The Evolution of Carmen Ortiz
by Painton
Summary: Carmen is an ordinary woman living an ordinary life as a research assistant when a bizarre accident sends her tumbling into the path of The Doctor. Now, instead of filing reports, she's battling aliens, trying to find her way back home. This series will span multiple Doctors, Companions, Eras and Planets as Carmen travels time and space and, occasionally, runs into The Doctor.
1. Ep1: The Echo In The Corridor

**Episode 1: The Echo In The Corridor.**

 **A scream echoes through the Tardis control room, but nothing can get past the shields. Or can it? The Doctor and Rose are drawn back to Earth to investigate an impossible sound, secret government experiments, and a young woman trapped in a deadly energy field. To save the world, the Doctor must choose: save a life, or save Rose?**

* * *

 _This story takes place between Episode 8 and 9, Season One. Nineth Doctor._

* * *

The corridor was empty and had been for years. An overturned trolley was gathering dust against one wall, and a broken corkboard hung by one nail on the other, its gouged out surface still advertising tattered bake sales, long-grown up babysitters and a failed medical study that offered to pay volunteers five dollars a day for three weeks to suffer through crippling stomach cramps and headaches all in the name of science.

The corridor was empty, that is, except for the sound of footsteps.

"Hello? Is somebody down there?"

The footsteps were followed by a voice, and then, by a young woman carrying a white lab coat folded over her arm. Her long hair was tied in a braid down her back, its color impossible to tell in the dim security lights. She stepped into the empty corridor and hesitated, looking back over her shoulder.

"Micky, is that you?" she called. Her voice echoed down the halls. "We've got to get back before the doctor starts asking questions. This isn't funny, Micky!"

There was no answering call. The woman frowned and turned to go. She took two steps and then stopped, tipping her head to one side and listening intently. There, at the edge of hearing was a humming noise, a buzzing sound like a tiny heartbeat racing or the ticking of a clock on overdrive. It might have been the hum of the electricity in the walls or the failing fluorescent lights overhead, but it seemed to be coming from behind her, from the farthest end of the corridor. She turned around and her frown deepened. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light and now she could see the two heavy, double-doors and a faint, red light that shone through the gap between them. But this part of the building was supposed to be empty; there wasn't supposed to be anyone down here.

"Micky?" she said, but she didn't call out this time. Her words were barely a whisper. _She_ wasn't supposed to be down here, either.

But that light… that bright, beautiful light. Before she knew what she was doing, she was at the door. Her hand was on the doorknob. The strange sound seemed to vibrate through the metal, up her arm and into her heart. If that hum was on the edge of hearing, then beyond that edge, on the other side was another sound, like a song, like a scream. It was all so familiar to her, and the light…

She opened the door. The light poured out around her feet, orange and yellow and red, hot and sharp and tasting like copper. She stepped through the door and let it fall shut behind her. The click of the latch echoed back down the empty corridor. A moment later, a woman screamed.

.

The Doctor leaped through the Tardis doors, laughing triumphantly, and raced to the console; he began pressing buttons and pulling levers but with a little more urgency than usual. The Tardis doors slammed shut, nearly catching Rose between them as she darted in after him. She was laughing, too, if a little more nervously, and she leaned back against the doors to catch her breath. Almost, she managed to forget the giddy tingling that passed across her skin as the ship, and her inside of it, dematerialized from time and space, leaving yet another alien world behind them.

She had her breath back now and turned on the Doctor. "I cannot believe that you did that!" she cried, stifling her laughter beneath mock outrage. "That thing- That Grand New… she! She was gonna slap you." Rose shot him an accusing look.

"Her name is Granulier," the Doctor told her. "Queen Granulier of the Delconier Five, also of several surrounding territories. Some of them are rather nice." He pulled a lever and the ship lurched, throwing Rose against the railing. "And she was _not_ going to slap me! We go way back, Granie and I."

"You call her Granny!?"

"Only when we're alone," the Doctor said, flashing his finest 'who-me?' smile. "You said you wanted to go to a party. Well?" His smile turned to a grin when she refused to answer him.

"It was a shame, really, we had to leave so suddenly," he went on, turning a dial on the console and noting the coordinates with a glance. "The canapés were very good. Did you have one of the green ones?"

"With the yellow bits on top, yeah." Rose nodded as she pulled herself up the ramp toward him.

"Gumblejack intestines," he said.

"What?"

"The yellow fiddly bits," he said without looking up. "Gumblejack intestines. Absolutely delicious, and a very worthy opponent for the expert fisherman so long as you use the right lure…" His hands stilled for a moment and he sighed. "I used to quite enjoy fishing."

"Is that where we're going?" Rose asked. The Tardis had held still long enough for her to make her way up to the console.

"Hm?" The Doctor looked at her, still half lost in his own thoughts. "Where?"

"Fishing?" she repeated. "Is that what we're doing next?" She tried to hide her disappointment and failed.

"You want to go fishing?" The Doctor stared at her blankly for a moment and then shook his head. "Not this time." He pushed a few more buttons and twisted a dial. "Are you hungry? I'm still hungry. Canapés do not a meal make. I know this great little place on Napir Prime that serves a brilliant cream of…"

But that was all he said. His mouth continued to move for a moment, but sound itself seemed to have been sucked out of the room. Even the groaning of the Tardis' engines was gone, although the Time Rotor continued its ponderous rise and fall above the console.

And then it began. The scream.

She had never heard anything so terrible. Rose doubled over against the console, pressing her hands to her ears, but the scream seemed to come from all around her, above and below, shrieking through the metal of the ship itself. At first, the Doctor tried to operate the Tardis sensors, to pinpoint the source of the noise, but eventually even he was forced to cover his ears.

And then it was gone. It did not fall silent or move away from them. It was there, and then it wasn't, and the silence rang in Rose's ears almost as loud as the scream.

Gradually, the engine sounds returned, the whooshing of the cooling vents, the whirring of the artificial gravity generator. But something was missing. Rose looked up and realized that she was seated on the floor next to the console. The Doctor had recovered much faster than her, and was looking up in amazement at the stalled Time Rotor.

"What was that?" Rose asked, pulling herself to her feet wiggling her fingers in her ears.

"The engine's stalled."

"Not that. I meant the… the…"

"The scream?" He looked at her. "A single, loud, long scream," he said. "A woman from the sound of it." He stepped to the other side of the console and pulled up the view screen and keyboard, touched a few keys and frowned. "Human, according to the sensors. The vocal range registers as pure human, but that's not possible. No human vocal system could even hope to reach these decibels."

"How did it get inside the Tardis?" Rose demanded. "You said nothing could get inside while the Tardis is flying, so how did it get in?"

"I don't know. I don't… the communications system doesn't register any incoming transmissions, or outgoing, not even any feedback." He pushed aside the screen in frustration. "How could it get inside?" he echoed, talking to himself now, and Rose let him, knowing that she would get more information that way.

"What is a scream?" the Doctor asked himself. "It's… sound. It's nothing!" He leaped around the console to a different panel and began turning dials and pulling levels.

"What are you doing now?" Rose asked, watching his hands move with dizzying speed over the controls.

"Sound is a wave, vibrations passing through the air, but this sound reached us inside the Tardis which means it's something more than that."

"But you just said it was nothing?"

"It is! Look, all you need to understand is…" He pulled a lever and the ship lurched. "I know how to follow it."

"But, if it was a human screaming…" Rose said slowly. He looked across the console at her, and she shook her head. "She sounded so scared and so..."

"Lonely," the Doctor finished for her. "So very lonely. I've heard that sound before." She looked expectant and he looked away. "In the swamps of Utraxia, they have an animal, like a dog, but the size of an elephant with legs like the trunks of trees. The Aiviq live in thick mud swamps, pushing their way through, but when they grow old… their legs become weak, they get stuck, and the family leaves them behind to sink into the mud and die. They abandon their own…"

He looked at Rose sadly. She said nothing. There was nothing to say.

The Doctor shook himself and stood up straighter. "But we won't abandon her, will we?" he said. He pulled a lever and the Tardis seemed to drop three feet down and six inches to the left, throwing Rose back against the console. "That was a distress signal if ever I've heard one, and we're going to save her!"

"But how?" Rose gasped. "How do you even know who she is?"

"I don't. Not yet."

"How will you find her, then?"

The Doctor's expression was grim and determined. "We start by follow the screams."

* * *

 **Cue title sequence and opening credits…**

 **For a long time, I've resisted the urge to write this Doctor Who fic because I suspected how involved it would become. I caught the germ of this story more than four years ago and over and over it has returned to plague me in daydreams and sleepless nights. But now, the virus has woken up, grown restless and, like any good alien infection, it threatens to wrack and ruin me if I do not unleash it onto an unsuspecting world.**

 ***Please review***

 **-Paint**


	2. Chapter 2

The Doctor opened the Tardis door slowly and looked out. "It's dark," he whispered. "Too dark."

He took a step forward, and then another. Rose had been delayed in grabbing her coat. She heard a crash and the sound of several large, heavy items hitting the floor. She looked up in time to see a roll of paper towels rolling in through the open door. "What is it?" she called, looking out. "Doctor? Are you okay?"

"Careful there. That first step is a doozy."

Rose stepped out carefully and eased her way along the side of the Tardis between its doors and a tall set of wood shelves that rose up in front of her. She kicked aside several fallen bottles of various cleaning solutions that smelled of bleach and mold.

"Broom closet?" she said, reaching the corner of the Tardis and emerging into a larger, but still very cramped, space, lit by the blue glow of the sonic screwdriver. The Doctor stood among a small forest of mops and brooms, passing the device over the closed and, presumably, locked door. "Why is it always inside closets with you?"

"Hey!" he protested. "It is not _always_ a closet." He turned back to the door. "Last time it was the pantry. Aha!" The lock on the door clicked open. "Now, let's see where we've got to."

"I thought you knew."

"I know that we are close to the source of the scream, but beyond that…" He began to step out, then stepped back and turned to Rose. "We should probably take extreme care with this one," he cautioned her. "A scream like that… anything could happen. That woman is probably in extreme danger."

"Probably," Rose agreed.

"Lots of guards," he went on, "who almost certainly will want to arrest us or kill us."

"Oh, without a doubt," she concurred.

"So, we must be very, very careful…"

He stepped out of the closet and into a long, broad hall. Rose followed him, looking left and right with curiosity and resisting the urge to laugh. The hallway was empty. Dim security lights shown on two long rows of closed doors and not much else. A green Exit sign indicated a stairwell at one end. The place was empty, but clean. The contents of the broom closet must have been well used by the housekeeping staff, but there were no guards. No killer robot armies. In fact, they style of the hall reminded Rose very much of a hospital's administration level.

The Doctor cleared his throat. "This is, well… rather disappointing, I think."

"Not to worry, Doctor." Rose patted his arm. "I'm sure we'll run into someone who wants to kill you."

"Now _that_ is sarcasm. Don't think I didn't notice." He stepped across the hallway and tried the nearest door. Locked.

Rose looked around. "No people," she said. She tried a different door, also locked. "Storage Room 553B. Authorized Personnel Only," she read the sign next to the door. "All these doors, 'Authorized Personnel Only'. Even the broom closet." She frowned as she looked at the closet door. "I thought the Tardis was homing in on the source of the scream we heard. Shouldn't she be here, then?"

"It's not that simple," the Doctor said, training the sonic screwdriver on the door lock. "It's like fishing."

"Fishing?" she stared at him.

"Yes, fishing. The scream was the lure, you see, and the Tardis' sensors tried to bite, but we didn't realize that we were in the wrong pond. You see? You don't see?"

Rose sighed and shook her head.

"How do you manage to tie your shoes in the morning?" he said, saw her look and had the decency to look a bit sheepish. "Alright, Rose, you felt the Tardis shudder, yes? You felt her struggle. Something was preventing the Tardis from landing at the source of the scream. Something stopped her from biting. I knew something was wrong! The coordinates were too… too stable, so I materialized nearby."

"If we're the fish, then who is the fisherman?" Rose asked, confused.

The Doctor opened his mouth, then closed it again. "Right," he said. "Fishing, not such a good analogy." The lock clicked and the door opened. "Here we are." He stepped inside and turned on the light.

Rose followed. She expected the usual storage room, lots of dust and cardboard boxes, maybe a few filing cabinets; but this place was clean, full of shiny metal shelves and row upon row of white, plastic boxes each labeled with a white filing card and a number. The Doctor walked past the shelves to the far wall and opened the blinds of a window there. The glass panes were dark; it was night outside.

The Doctor opened the window and put out his hand. Rose watched him scoop a lump of snow off the sill outside and lick it. She had learned early on not to ask.

"North Dakota," he said. "2030… ish."

"Where?"

"Or was it Wisconsin? I can never remember. North America, certainly. Dull place, lots of snow." He made a face and threw the melting snow back out the window. He turned back to Rose. "It's the tannins, you see. I've only been in the area once before. Got lost on my way to Dallas, 1963. Worked it out eventually, of course."

"Of course," Rose said, shaking her head.

The Doctor wiped his damp hand on his trousers and took one of the plastic boxes off of a nearby shelf. He opened it, looked inside, then closed it and put it back again.

"Aren't landing coordinates meant to be stable?" Rose asked. "Isn't that what stops you materializing inside a wall or halfway hanging out a moving bus? You have to know where you're landing."

"Hm? Yes. I mean, no. The Tardis coordinates can never be _that_ stable. Inter-dimensional coordinates take into account geographic movement, the speed of a planet's rotation, for example, or the gravitational pull of its sun, while the time coordinates…" He could see Rose's eyes glazing over again. "It's not like jumping o _nto_ a moving bus, it's like jumping _out_. For that split second while the Tardis is materializing, we have to remain in motion, just a little bit, matching the speed of both the physical world and the timeline that we are entering. We have to catch up or… SPLAT!"

Rose considered that for a long moment while the Doctor looked into several more boxes. "So the woman who was screaming, her coordinates weren't moving? They were stable, you said."

"The _Time_ coordinates were stable, and there was something getting in the way of the dimensional coordinates, too… You felt the Tardis shift. It was fighting something, trying to… trying to jump out of the bus without opening the door. I had to put us down near the source of the scream but outside the range of… whatever it was. But that's not what's important right now. _This_ is what is important right now. Will you look at this!" He had opened yet another box and took out a large, plastic sphere the size of a softball. On one side was a black battery casing with two blue lights blinking back and forth very quickly.

"Is there something inside." Rose squinted through the plastic casing. "It looks like a seed?"

"It's a... Yes, a seed." The Doctor shook the sphere next to his ear and frowned. He took out his sonic screwdriver yet again and aimed it at the battery casing. "It's in a stasis pod! A very powerful one, considering the size. Why would anyone put a seed in a stasis pod? And that's an atomic power cell keeping it running. Brilliant! But why? Something this strong could freeze Yosemite Falls! It could turn aside a thunder storm! What's it doing preserving a seed?" He turned up the pulse on the sonic and pressed it closer.

"Are you sure you should be doing that?" Rose eyed the sphere nervously.

"It's only a seed," he said, without looking up. "What's a seed need a stasis pod for? It's perfectly saf…"

And then the room exploded.

Rose shut her eyes against the flash of orange-gold and then everything turned green. She felt the air sizzle as her hair stood on end and heard a crash, much louder than the crash of the Doctor walking into a broom closet shelf; it was the sound of bending metal and breaking plastic being crushed under a hundred pounds of wood. Rose opened her eyes. She was standing in a tree.

It wasn't a very large tree, of course, or she would have been crushed, too. The thickest branches were less than the width of her arm, and her feet still touched the floor of the storeroom. There were branches everywhere. Some of them had broken through the wall two feet to the right of her and she let out her breath, grateful that she had not been standing there when the stasis field collapsed. She couldn't see anything but branches and leaves.

"Rose!" The Doctor's voice was muffled by the foliage. "Rose! Where are you?"

She spit out a mouthful of leaves. "I think I'm in a tree," she shouted. "Why am I in a tree!? What did you do?"

"It wasn't me! I just…" The branches shook indignantly. "How was I supposed to know they'd fixed a time loop into a stasis pod!? You stupid humans, always mucking about! Oh, what's this do? I don't know, let's stick it in the closet until we think of something! Those things are barely stable at the best of times. You don't just leave them lying around for anyone to…!"

"Still standing in a tree, Doctor!"

"Right. Sorry. Ah, meet you back at the door."

Rose sighed in frustration. "Alright. Back to the door," she said, and looked around, trying to guess which way the door was. She heard the Doctor rustling branches on his side of the room and followed him. Not far from her, she found a broken metal shelf and pulled a bent side support free to use to beat back the branches in her way, but a machete would have been more effective.

She reached an especially thick cluster of branches and had to climb over them. As she stood up on a particularly thick branch, she caught sight of the Doctor on the other side of the room, and called out to him, "Over here, Doctor."

He looked up and stopped short. "Be careful," he said. "There may be more stasis pods in here, on the floor. If you were to step on one of those and it were to break it open…"

"More trees," Rose said, nodding.

"Or something else."

She winced. "Right, careful. Understood." She eased herself down to the floor as gently as she could and for the rest of the way, slid her feet along the floor. She hated to think where any more trees would fit in this place.

The Doctor reached the door just as Rose arrived, and they burst out into the hallway in a shower of leaves, picking twigs out of their hair. The main trunk had broken through the wall and hung several feet into the hallway. The roots of the tree could be seen, digging into the floor and ceiling, searching for soil and water. The top must have broken through the outside window.

"They fit a whole tree inside that little ball," Rose said, amazed.

"Not inside the ball. Inside the seed. They took a whole tree and rewound time to force it back into a seed and then they put that seed into a bloody stasis pod to keep it that way. But why? Why go to all the trouble for a seed? It's not as if this is any rare or valuable tree, either. It's just a larch. There's billions of them, all over the universe."

"They've got larches on other planets?"

"Very common in cold climates." The Doctor grinned. "Mind you, I didn't need to get this close to identify a larch. I'm quite good at recognizing different types of trees from quite a long ways away…" She looked at him blankly, and he sighed. "Come on."

"Where are we going now?"

"To find the lab. This is just storage." He looked back at the tree thoughtfully. "The technology needed to do that is pretty advanced for this time period. Stasis pods, I might believe, but a time loop…" He shook his head. "Someone is playing with forces far beyond their understanding."

He turned away and started walking, but Rose hesitated. "You don't think anyone will notice?" she said. "You know, tree growing in a storage room…"

"I doubt it. Not until morning, anyway. But just in case…" He walked back and pushed the door shut. Rose looked at the two feet of trunk still sticking out of the wall next to the door and sighed. "Look at it this way," the Doctor said, "those stasis pods have a failure rate of at least .03%. That storage room was an accident waiting to happen."

Rose couldn't argue with that. They started down the hall, heading for the distant Exit sign.

"So, is that why the Tardis couldn't land?" she asked. "The time loops in those pods were getting in the way."

"I doubt it. Stasis pods are fragile, but the time loop was contained. Besides, a loop, even a hundred loops that small wouldn't affect the Tardis. No, there's something else."

Rose frowned. "The coordinates," she said, and he looked at her expectantly. "You said that the Time coordinates were too stable, so… if Dimension coordinates are physical, up and down, forwards and backwards… then Time coordinates should be… moving forward in time."

"Good! Yes, that's good. You're learning." They passed out the Exit door into a narrow stairwell. When he had looked out the window earlier the Doctor had noted that the building was only two stories above ground, but the stairwell went down deeper than that. He looked up, then started down the stairs, toward the basement levels. "Time coordinates, within a timeline, are moving either forwards or backwards."

"Backwards? The tree was _forced_ backwards in time." Rose shuddered. "I'd hate to know what that felt like, but are there really things that go backwards in time? Naturally, I mean."

"Mostly lichen, fungus, a few simple animals. And these little purple worms that stretch out thin and live in the space between seconds."

"You're making that up."

"Am not! Back to the point. Time coordinates?"

"Right. Time coordinates show movement in time, and you said that the scream was human, not a fungus, so her coordinates were wrong because they _weren't_ moving. Humans can stand still in space, but not in time."

"Not in space, either," the Doctor said. "You humans, you're always moving, spinning around the axis of a planet, planets spinning around the sun, sun spinning around the galaxy. Even out in space itself, your ships are always moving. You lot never stand still. Don't you get tired?"

"Not me." Rose laughed. "And you should talk! When have you ever stood still?"

They had reached the landing and another door. The doctor stopped with his hand on the knob and held up a finger for her to wait. Rose froze. The Doctor froze. After a moment, Rose grinned and shook her head. The Doctor smiled and opened the door; he glanced out, and then quickly closed it again, standing back against the wall.

"Now, that's more like it," he said, nodding to the narrow window that looked out from the stairwell.

Outside was another hall, much like the one they had left two stories up, only this was bustling with people, men and women in lab coats and younger ones hurrying after them with all the eager, anxious air of student interns. More and more, Rose would have said that the building they were in was a hospital, only there were no patients. A school then, she decided, or some sort of research facility.

The Doctor peered over her shoulder out the window. "And there is exactly what we need," he said.

Rose saw what he was looking at and sighed. She knew that it would be her job to get it.

.

Not long after that, the stairwell door opened and Rose stepped slowly out. She looked around anxiously, but no one was paying any attention to her. She looked just like any of the other students, nervous and uncertain, if a little more flamboyantly dressed. She crossed the hall and, after another quick glance around, took one of the white lab coats down from a row of hooks near an office. She rolled it up in her arms and hurried back to the stairwell.

When the door opened next, the Doctor stepped out wearing the lab coat and name badge that went along with it. Rose trotted along at his heels. She had no coat of her own, but no one gave them a second look. An official, older man with a pretty, blonde assistant trailing after him; there were dozens of those walking around already.

"I can't believe this is working," Rose whispered as they passed a small cluster of men and women huddled over a clipboard. She nodded to an Asian woman about her own age as they passed by, but the woman stared at her without seeming to see her. "It's never this easy," Rose said.

"No, it never is." The Doctor was less impressed. He knew that nothing was easy, and he wasn't comfortable until, half a dozen yards further, he looked up to see two security guards marching towards them down the hall with their guns displayed prominently in their ankle holsters.

"Ah, this is familiar. We are definitely back in America," he muttered. "Always with the guns!"

"Back to the stairs?" Rose asked hopefully, seeing the guards.

"Yes. Good plan. Tactical retreat."

They both turned on their heels and stopped short. Two more guards were already stationed behind them, hands on their guns, flanking a stern, older woman who had no gun but the look on her face was almost as dangerous. Her blonde hair was streaked with gray and tightly bound to the back of her head. A severe pair of glasses perched precariously on her small nose, and though her jaw was tense and tight, she smiled at them with the air of someone used to getting things done efficiently.

Almost like magic, the bustling hallway cleared of all but a handful of people and these, their welcoming committee.

"Ah... Hello, I'm the Doctor," the Doctor said, quickly stuffing his stolen ID badge into his pocket; he didn't think that this woman would miss the fact that his face did not match the photo. He held out his hand to her, seeing that she was very obviously in charge. "And this is Rose."

"Hello," Rose said weakly.

"How did you get into this building?" the woman demanded.

"Well, we, ah…" The Doctor gestured back toward the stairs.

"This is a secured building. We conduct classified, government research here, and no one is allowed inside without clearance, so how did you get in?"

"All these students are working on classified, government projects in the middle of the night?" the Doctor said, tut-tutting at her. "I don't think so. But that's not what we're here for. I don't suppose you've heard a woman screaming, somewhere in the near vicinity? Or, someone who looks a bit like a screamer? It may not actually have happened yet."

The woman stared at him for a moment and then shook her head. "I don't have time to deal with corporate spies. Not today." She nodded to the guards. "Take them upstairs and lock them up. We'll call the authorities in the morning." She turned to go.

Rose and the Doctor exchanged unhappy looks as the guards took hold of their arms and began to lead them away. They could hardly conduct a search and rescue mission while locked inside a jail cell.

* * *

 **Please forgive my completely made up sci-fi sounding technology. Everyone knows that stasis pods would never come with battery packs that small. Those suckers would burn out a Duracell faster than a smartphone streaming Michael Bay.**

 **But fungus really do grow backwards in time. Never trust a mushroom.**

 **-Paint**


	3. Chapter 3

"Easy!" the Doctor shouted, wincing at the grip on his arm as the guards led them away. "You'll bruise the leather!"

"Doctor…!" Rose hissed. He looked down at her and she nodded toward his jacket pocket.

"What?"

"Your _credentials_."

"It won't work. That photo looks nothing like me. It looked a bit like you, no offence, but an awful lot more like that gentleman over there, and... ah, right."

The Doctor was looking at an overweight, balding scientist who had just poked his head out of his office to see what the commotion was all about. It was the same door from which Rose had taken the Doctor's borrowed lab coat. The man heard what was said, looked around and put a hand to his shirt pocket where, noticeably, no ID badge hung.

"No! I mean the… the _psychic paper_ ," Rose whispered, furtively eyeing the guards walking alongside them.

The Doctor stared at her blankly for a moment before realization dawned. "Oh, right!" He stood up straight and pulled at the arm of the guard who held him. "Yes, credentials. I've got identification, very important identification. You'll want to see this!" he shouted back over his shoulder.

The two guards hesitated. The woman-in-charge was halfway down the hall, but she heard him. She stopped and sighed and turned back to them, gesturing for the guards to release the Doctor.

"If you had proper permission to be here, then you would not have had to break into my building," she said, "but any identification will be useful tomorrow, when we hand you over to the local police as a thief and a spy." She held out her hand, and he gave her the thin wallet, flipped open to a blank square of paper.

The woman glanced briefly at the card, read it, frowned, and then read it again. Her expression twisted from one of mild annoyance to one of extreme disgust as she read aloud, "Compliance Evaluation and Investigative Services Department, Office of Occupational Safety and Health Administration," she read aloud. "I was not aware that OSHA would be conducting a review."

"Well, you know how things are," the Doctor said, quickly plucking the psychic paper back again before she could look too carefully at it. "Can't give you too much time to hide the incriminating documents, can we? As I said before, I'm the Doctor, investigator, and this is Rose Tyler, my assistant." Rose cleared her throat. "Ah, I mean, my very _personal_ assistant," he corrected, smiling at her as if he had made some sort of improvement.

"And if I might ask, who you are? You're not wearing a badge." He turned his attention back to the woman-in-charge.

"I do not wear identification because I do not need to identify myself," she said, angrily. "I am Chelsey McNeil. _Doctor_ Chelsey McNeil, Head of Projects for all of Gateway." After a moment, she nodded to the security guards who took their hands off of Rose as well. "It strikes me as being very late for an OSHA review."

"You all are still up." The Doctor smiled. Dr. McNeil did not.

"Still, it is a very inconvenient time for us," she said quickly. "Deadlines coming due, people out sick, but if you would be so good as to contact my assistant in the morning, I'm sure I'll be able to work you in. We simply don't have the staff available to show you around tonight."

"Oh, no need to bother about us," the Doctor said, matching McNeil's exaggerated politeness. "We can find our own way around."

The Daleks could have learned a thing or two from the woman's cold stare. "You'll want to see the Personnel files first," she said, with the icy air of a glacier. "This way." She turned and began walking without waiting for them to follow.

"Whatever you're looking or, you will not find it here," McNeil told them as they made their way through the wide halls of Gateway. "Nothing goes on in this building that I do not know about, and I assure you that our workers are in absolutely no danger whatsoever!"

"If that is true, then you have no reason to object to our investigation," the Doctor said, but he felt a strange sizzle in the air and looked searchingly at the walls. If there was no danger, then why was the hair on the back of his neck standing on end?

.

Dr. McNeil led the Doctor and Rose to a large, glass-walled conference room overlooking what had once been the old hospital's commissary. The kitchen had been closed off, replaced with a bank of automated food service equipment. The eating space was filled with whiteboards, long tables and a long wall of computer banks humming away in sleep mode. During the day, the room would be filled with the various project managers leading team meetings and moral building exercises. In the middle of the night, the place was as empty and silent as a tomb. Four students sat silently around a table, resting their eyes and drinking their coffee, looking as grey and sickly as the walking dead.

Several unrolled diagrams had been left on a table and, as they passed by, the Doctor stopped to look over the work.

"Dr. Davis's plans for a..."

"Hydraulic crane," the Doctor said. "The design is remarkably compact."

"Indeed." Dr. McNeil gave him a hard look. "We anticipate that the energy output will be..."

"Not nearly as much as you hope." He shook his head and pointed to three of the joints. "The steel isn't nearly strong enough to hold up under the pressures you're expecting here and here. Somebody fudged their math a bit. How long has this project been going on?"

"Nearly eight months," Dr. McNeil said, angrily. "We've spent nearly four million dollars in grant money developing that design."

The Doctor shook his head. "You'll want to get your money back on that one," he said. "Still, a good try."

McNeil was staring hard at the design. Rose elbowed the Doctor in the side. "Ah, right. Personnel was this way?"

They walked on, up an open flight of stairs and to a door. Dr. McNeil showed them into the conference room. "You'll be able to access Gateway's employment records from here," she said, gesturing to a large table and several chairs that surrounded it.

Rose guessed that this was as good a time as any to slip away. "Dr. McNeil, I wonder if I might just use the 'little girls' room' while you're having the files brought in. No sense waiting until we're knee deep in paperwork, eh?"

The woman looked at her with amusement. " _Paper_ work? How quaint." She pressed her hand to the table and a large screen lit up, hovering just above the faux wood surface. It glowed pale green and displayed a rotating diamond-shaped logo in blue and yellow above the words "Gateway Institute - Your Gateway to Worlds Beyond".

"Personnel department," Dr. McNeil said to the computer in a loud, clear voice, "employee profiles, Delta level entry."

The electronic imitation of the book pages being flipped passed swiftly from one end of the table to the other. The default screen disappeared, and a cascade of several dozen electronic profiles fluttered across the display.

"This is all of your employees?" the Doctor asked, swiping his finger over the screen, sifting through the files.

"As many as your clearance will allow you to review," McNeil said. "Most of our work is classified. We supply several government and military contracts…"

"You would be very surprised at what I have clearance for," the Doctor said.

He aimed his sonic screwdriver at the display and a dozen more profiles flipped onto the virtual pile. Including Dr. McNeil's own. She glared at him but said nothing. Rose hoped that she had finally decided that the Doctor was a problem too far above her pay grade. She hoped, but she didn't really believe it. Chelsey McNeil did not seem the sort of woman to let a problem go unattended.

"I think I'll have a look for that rest room now," Rose said quietly, inching toward the door. She did not like the way Dr. McNeil looked at her, as if the Head of Projects were conducting an employee review that Rose was destined to fail.

Dr. McNeil pinched one of several buttons on the lapel of her suitcoat. "Jonathon, bring two visitors' badges to the Apollo conference room. We have guests." She turned back to Rose. "Once you have your badge, you may move about the building freely. Or, as freely as your clearance will allow," she added with a meaningful glance at the Doctor. "I think that you will find it not nearly as extensive as you imagine."

With that, the Head of Gateway Institute turned on her sensible heels and left them. "You don't suppose she's lying?" she asked the Doctor once the door had closed and they were alone again.

"Of course she's lying," he said, still searching the computer files. "She's an executive. Tell the truth and get your funding cut. You can bet Dr. Davis will be out on the curb first thing in the morning. I imagine he's known for a long time now that his project was doomed, been squirreling away cash and updating his CV, just waiting for the axe to drop."

"I meant, do you think that she's lying about letting us wander around, asking questions?"

"Why don't you find out?"

Rose shook her head and leaned over the table. The profiles were basic, names and education, project title and a summary that was as good as Greek to her. She sighed and was glad when the conference room door finally opened and a young man in a suit and tie entered. His almond skin and smooth brown hair were nearly the same color, and Rose smiled at him, but his eyes darted into every corner of the room; it was not until he has assured himself that Dr. McNeil was not present that he seemed to relax, slightly, and to begin breathing again.

"You're Jonathan, right?" she asked, encouragingly.

"Dr. McNeil's personal secretary, ma'am" he said, handing her a white, plastic ID badge emblazoned with the Gateway logo. "Your badge, please, ma'am. You'll have to wear it visible at all times. And your badge, sir," he said, holding out a second ID card to the Doctor. "You'll have to wear it visible at all times, sir…"

"Yes, yes. I heard. Put it there," the Doctor said, engrossed in the files.

"Right, sir. Good evening, sir."

Jonathan turned to go, but the Doctor stood up suddenly and stopped him. "Wait, you there. Jonny-boy."

"Jonathan, sir. Yes, sir?" The man was shaking so badly that Rose felt sorry for him. Dr. McNeil was some sort of boss to have that effect on a person, but the Doctor didn't seem to notice.

"This place, Gateway Institute, what is it?" he asked.

"Sir?"

"What do you all do here?"

"It's a research lab, sir. Surely you've heard of us. Everyone on Earth has heard of Gateway. People wait for years just to interview at this place. Sir."

"Yes, research, but what _kind_ of research? You must have a specialty."

"We do, sir."

"And?" the Doctor prodded impatiently.

Jonathan smiled. "Everything," he said, and then left them.

The Doctor stared at the door. "Everything!?" he muttered. "Give me your phone." Rose did, and he plugged the device into the tabletop display. "I'm downloading the employee records. You'll need them."

"Great. For what?"

He tossed her back the phone. "You're going to interview the staff. There's three hundred and twenty women and men working at the institute. Most of them will have gone home for the night, but there's no point in wasting time. Still… You should be careful. And you'll need this." He tossed her the wallet containing the psychic paper.

"Aren't you coming?"

He shook his head. "I've got better things to do than questioning a bunch of foolish, over-evolved apes."

"Thank you!"

The Doctor looked up at her. "I'm sorry, Rose. Really, I am, but there's something going on here. Something much bigger than safety violations or grant forgery. That stasis sphere may not have been very advanced, but a time loop that grows a tree back into a seed should not exist on this world. And the air," he stood up and waved his arms around. "The air is all wrong, don't you feel it!?"

Rose shook her head. She didn't feel anything but the cold breeze of the air conditioner. "I'll ask around," she told him. "If there's something strange going on, someone must have seen something."

"I think that someone already did, or will do," he said, looking back at the table display. "We still don't know _why_ our mystery woman was screaming."

"You don't think they would..."

"I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong and there is no mystery woman. Maybe the sound we heard was feedback from the Tardis engines reflecting off an anomaly in the Time Vortex."

"But that's not what you think," Rose said.

"No, that's not what I think, but it is what I hope. Be careful, Rose." He sat down again at the table and began flipping through the employee profiles once again. Rose turned to go, but hesitated at the door. "You'll be careful, too, Doctor, won't you?" she asked, but he didn't hear her. He was paging through the electronic files, reading at lightning speed.

.

Rose walked the halls of Gateway, listening to the sound of her own boots clicking against the tile floor. She had yet to exceed the bounds of whatever Chelsey McNeil thought her clearance level should be, but that wasn't for lack of trying. Every door but the exits had a card reader, and no locked door had responded to her guest's badge. It was the middle of the night and most of the halls were empty; she had only passed one employee in her search, and he had ignored her fake credentials and ducked behind a locked door. It was just as well, the psychic paper insisted on calling her the doctor's _Very_ Personal Assistant.

"You're supposed to show people what _I_ want them to see," she muttered, slapping the wallet against her hip. She had been determined to prove herself after she left the conference room. This place was no space station. There were no killer mannequins or gas-lamp ghosts. This should have been the easiest mystery they had investigated and yet, she was going to be beaten by a screwdriver and a stack of electronic filing.

She watched the janitor pass by, slowly pushing his broom down the hall, and then stepped up to another closed door. She swiped her badge over the sensor. Buzz. Error. No luck. She read the nameplate over the door: Fred Dvoratrelunda, Theoretical Linguistics, Alzarian Id Project.

The Doctor would know what that meant.

Rose was about to turn away when she heard a man shouting across the hall. She had all but given up finding anyone working so late but turned around to see the opposite door thrown open and a young woman stumble out into the hall, dropping file folders as she went. Red-headed and Hispanic, the woman clutched an armload of clipboards to her chest and had a role of schematic paper tucked under each elbow.

The man shouted after her, "Did I ask for the blue file!? _No_! Are you deaf, woman?! The _red_ file! The _red file_! What am I supposed to do with this rubbish!?" A flurry of pale blue papers flew out of the room. "I put in for a new assistant, not the damn _maid_! Now, _GO_! Pick up that mess and _GET ME MY FILES_!"

The young woman winced as the door was slammed shut in her face. "Pendejo," she muttered. She was about to kneel down to pick up the thrown papers when she saw Rose standing nearby, listening. The woman ducked her head, embarrassed, and quickly began gathering up the files.

Rose knelt down to help. "Don't let him get to you," she said in what she hoped was a reassuring voice. "I had a boss like that once. A real git. His life was miserable, and he was always taking it out on other people." She handed the woman a stack of disheveled papers. "You alright, then?"

The woman nodded. "I'm Rose." Rose held out her hand. "Rose Tyler."

She hesitated a moment before she took it. "Carmen," she said. "Carmen Santiago Ortiz. You don't have to be nice to me. I'm an intern."

"You're still a human being. He shouldn't treat you like that." Rose frowned. "Did you say, San Diego? As in..."

Carmen scowled. "San _tia_ go," she said briskly, "and yes, I have heard _all_ the jokes. But Dr. Kuri is brilliant. He oversees some of the most important projects at Gateway. He's just… it's his way, you know. Brilliant men are always pushing other people around, Micky said. But I'm just an intern. I go where they tell me. Anyway, I'm only working with him until they can fine a replacement for Micky… I mean Mia... Dr. Chen. She worked with him for almost eight months and he hardly ever shouted at her." She tried to laugh.

"Is she on vacation, then?" Rose asked with a smile. "Gone someplace warm?"

"No. I don't know. She's just... gone." Carmen looked away. "They say she resigned."

"But you don't think she did?"

"She wouldn't leave without..." Her eyes narrowed and she looked at Rose with suspicion. "Who are you, anyway? You're not a student. Why are you asking so many questions?"

"This is a research facility, aren't people supposed to ask questions?" The woman stood up and turned to go, but Rose pulled out the psychic paper and showed her what she hoped were official credentials. "No, sorry! Look, I'm here with the Doctor. We're here to help."

"OSHA?" Carmen frowned as she read the card. "Don't you guys investigate ergonomic chairs and whether the eyewash stations are working?"

"The Doctor tends to dig a bit deeper than that." Rose hesitated, because having a jerk for a boss wasn't the sort of thing the Doctor would take an interest in, but a missing woman was. "You don't think that Mia resigned, do you? You think something happened to her."

"She wouldn't leave without telling me. I'm sorry, I have to go. Dr. Kuri will start yelling again if I don't get his files." It wasn't just Dr. Kuri that Carment was afraid of. Rose could see she was looking anxiously around her just as Jonathon had done. She thought that they were being watched.

"Whatever is going on, you can tell me," Rose said, lowering her voice. "Please, let us help you."

"I don't need your help. I need to do my job," Carmen said. "An internship at Gateway will get me accepted to any college. I'll have twenty job offers within a week of getting out of this place! Mia Chen resigned. She left Gateway and went back to Iowa to look after her kid brother. Now, I've got to get back to work." She left Rose and hurried away down the hall, balancing the mess of papers in her arms.

Rose watched her go, unhappy and twice as suspicious as she had been before. They were looking for a woman in trouble, after all, and if Mia Chen had _not_ resigned, if she really were missing and in danger, then maybe, just maybe, Rose had discovered their mystery screamer after all. She stepped up to the door that Carmen had rushed out of and read the nameplate.

"Dr. Markus Kuri-Hunt, Paleomagnetism… No project title?" Rose frowned, thinking of the missing Mia Chen, Dr. Kuri's former assistant. "What are you working on, Dr. Kuri?"

She stepped back again, unwilling to risk catching the wrathful Dr. Kuri's attention. She might still thank him, though, for something else that he had said. Gateway may be a prestigious institute, so important that even a beaten down intern like Carmen would fight to protect its reputation, but there was always one person in any company too low on the totem pole to care about keeping up appearances.

Not far away, she found the old janitor still pushing his broom, and she didn't need psychic paper to get him talking. A pretty girl willing to listen was all the encouragement he needed to fill her in on all that he had seen in the halls of Gateway.


	4. Chapter 4

Carmen hurried down the hall toward the bank of elevators. Whatever her badge said, Rose was no government agent. No one came to Gateway to ask that sort of question, to actually _care_ about another human being. They came here to ask what happens if we recombine this DNA protein with that one. Will it produce a new potato hearty enough to withstand the early frosts? Can we remove this molecule from that plastic composite, and will it increase the strength of the substance without sacrificing flexibility? But, more than any other question, people came to Gateway to ask, what are our profit margins? How do we increase the yield? Will this thing make money?

No one came to ask you if you needed help, and they certainly wouldn't offer it to you if you did.

Carmen took the elevator to the top floor of the building where the halls were dark and deserted. During the day, the upper floors were filled with students and interns running back and forth with files and computer disks, dropping off and picking up on errands from whichever scientist they had been assigned to work under that day. Carmen didn't know half of everything that was stored up here; she only had access to the one room where Dr. Kuri kept his private files.

She turned down the hall, covering a yawn as she walked. It was late, and she had spent the day running off her feet, torn between Dr. Sung, Dr. Kuri and Dr. Eriksson. In a way, she was grateful; three projects and one intern left her little time to worry about missing Mia.

Balancing the stack of folders on one arm, Carmen swiped her keycard over the lock on the door to Dr. Kuri's room. He was an old-fashioned scientist and preferred paper to computers; a computer could be hacked much easier than a fortress file room like this. Gateway had one of the most up-to-date security systems, and it had been years since anyone had succeeded in getting past the reception desk without being flagged.

Carmen left the folders on an old cart to be filed tomorrow morning when she wasn't so tired, and then she looked around. Everything in Dr. Kuri's file room was locked, and her keycard only opened the handful of the drawers that had been retrofitted with computerized locks. The rest still used antique, cut-metal keys. Supposedly, the really good thieves still knew how to pick those locks with nothing but a bit of wire. Carmen didn't believe it. All she knew was that those locks were impossible to hack and impervious to even the most advanced surge generators and pulse guns.

Until today, she hadn't cared enough to ask what was in those other drawers, but Rose's questions had started her thinking. She stepped up to one of the filing cabinets and pulled on a drawer. Locked.

She was being paranoid, she told herself, as she retrieved Dr. Kuri's red folder from the next drawer over. Probably the cabinets were full of voltage readings and old, unpatented circuit designs. That was all the man seemed to do when she was around, build circuit boards and analyze the readouts of old magnetic field generators. She left the file room and locked the door behind her. She turned to go back to the elevator, but something caught her eye.

There, at the far end of the hall… had that shape been there before? It was a dark, curling shadow with a dozen arms reaching out in all directions. For a moment, Carmen found herself wondering what sort of ghosts would haunt the ancient halls of an abandoned hospital. How many old grandmothers and little babies had died in the rooms around her? But a far more pressing question was, why had someone left a half-dead tree trunk sticking out of the wall?

She approached the thing slowly, imagining a prank rather than a paranormal explanation. She reached out her hand to touch one of the twisted roots and felt grit under her fingers that was not plastic or fiberglass. It was real, rotting wood. The sheetrock walls were cracked and broken where the trunk had burst through them. The roots were stunted, a fraction of the size they would have been in the ground, but a few seemed to have optimistically tried to grow through the laminate floor. If it was a fake, it was a very good one.

Carmen shook her head. Some of the students at Gateway had far too much time on their hands, she decided, but out of curiosity as to how far their joke went, she tried to open the door nearest to where the trunk bust from the wall.

To her surprise, the door was unlocked. The only unlocked door in this hall should have been the broom closet. She turned on the light and stared at the room in amazement. It was not a broom closet. Branches, branches everywhere, with a few dead leaves still clinging to them, but most had fallen and gathered in rotting piles on the floor. She heard them crunching underneath her shoes. The whole room stank of rot and damp. She couldn't see to the far wall; it was too full of the tree. This wasn't a prank. It couldn't be. This was a real, living – a real _dying_ tree!

But that was impossible. Carmen had been down this hall no more than an hour ago gathering files from Dr. Kuri's store room. She would certainly have noticed a dead tree sticking out of the wall!

She kicked a pile of leaves, still half convinced that it was only a prank, but her foot struck against something hard and hollow. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands, brushing away the dead leaves. It was the broken corner of one of the generic plastic boxes that Gateway used for storing vials and samples and anything that wouldn't fit in a folder or rolled up in a tube. A small label was still stuck to one side: MKH16 - Classified.

MKH. Dr. Markus Kuri-Hunt. Carmen knew his initials as well as her own. Every file in his office was stamped with those letters.

She dropped the box and left the room, shutting the door behind her. The room had been unlocked! With a tree sticking out of it! She could lose her internship if she was found poking around in classified storage. Why hadn't she checked the door first? The initials were there, too. MKH – Classified – Authorized Personnel Only. And she wasn't authorized.

She looked around anxiously. The hall was empty, of course, but that didn't mean that she wasn't being watched. The institute had cameras everywhere. Everything was monitored.

More than a little shaken, Carmen turned and started back down the hall. She wanted to go home and hide under her bed. She would forget this night ever happened. Maybe she would call in sick tomorrow and wait for everything to blow over. Maybe she would quit and save them the trouble of firing her.

But what about the tree? Had that been the project that Mia was working on before she left? If it had been a virus that killed the tree, Carmen wouldn't have been surprised that Mia was unhappy, but what virus could do that? What caused a tree to grow and live and die in a locked room all in less than half an hour? Where was Mia? What happened to her?

Carmen knew that she couldn't go to Dr. McNeil with her questions; whatever was going on, the head of Gateway was certainly in on it. They were probably already watching her, waiting for her to slip up. She couldn't go to the police; the local government been bought and paid for by the Institute long ago. Besides, any officer worth his salt would write her off as crazy the moment she mentioned the dead tree growing out of the wall. There was no one. No one would help her.

But, as she stepped onto the elevator, she remembered Rose and her fake OSHA credentials. The ID might have been fake, but the offer of help had been very real. Would Rose be willing to listen to her? She had already brushed off the woman once. More than that, would Rose and her partner even believe what Carmen had to say? He was a doctor. That had to be some sort of authority, but it also meant that he would want evidence before he believed anything.

Well, then she would need to find some, find something to show them that was bigger than a dead tree, and Carmen had a pretty good idea where to look.

.

Rose discovered that, compared to Carmen, the janitors of Gateway were far more useful than the interns. The man that she had caught up with, Neil Flynn, was short on details – at least on useful details - but long on gossip. According to Neil the Janitor, Mia Chen had indeed disappeared overnight. Quite literally.

Usually, she worked late and ate her dinner at her desk – Neil had timed his rounds so that he reached the office that she shared with Dr. Kuri last and emptied her wastebasket after she had finished her meal – but three nights ago, he had watched her carrying her take-out bag into the office and, when he came back two hours later, she was gone. Her purse, her coat, all her files and paperwork, the personal items she kept on her desk… all gone. And there was no food in the wastebasket either. It was as if Mia Chen had never worked in that office before.

Rose had to put up with a lot of Neil's paranoid talk of CIA operatives headhunting the scientists from Gateway, but eventually, between grousing about the greedy scientists and a lack of Christmas bonus checks, he mentioned a secret lab that no one, not even the housekeeping staff, was allowed to have a look in. In fact, the whole basement floor was off-limits to all but a handful of employees and Dr. McNeil.

"What, the whole floor is closed off?" she asked, knowing a clue when she heard it.

"It's not just that we can't clean the lab, mind you," he told Rose. "I wouldn't mind that. There's lots of places they don't want us in, lots of places I wouldn't go if they paid me. Them scientists toying with radiation and viruses like they're toys. No skin off my nose if they got one more room they don't want me in, but just last month, one of the new girls was down there, sweeping the stairwells just like they ask us to. She stepped off the bottom step just for a minute to get her broom into the corners, and the next morning I hear that they've fired her!"

"And Dr. Kuri-Hunt works on the basement floor?" Rose asked.

"Well, he's one of the few with clearance to go down there. I've seen him on his way down, always looking like the mouse what stole the cheese. They got locks on the doors, of course, and keycards to go with them, but them power surges down there, they don't half work all the time. Andrew's always got his tool box down there, fiddling with the wires, changing out the old fuses that've burnt up." Neil looked around as if he only just realized what he was saying. "S'cuse me, miss, but I really shouldn't have told you that. I got work to do now. S'cuse me."

Rose let him go. She had heard more than enough. The halls of Gateway Institute that had been bustling when they had first arrived were empty now, the lights turned out, the people gone home. The commissary below the conference room where she had left the Doctor was deserted. She hurried up the stairs, but the conference room was empty, too, and the tabletop computer had shut down. Only the glow of the Gateway logo lit the room with an eerie blue light.

"Doctor," she sighed and shook her head. "Where are you?" She couldn't help but suspect that he had sent her away just so that he could explore some more dangerous mystery himself. "If I were a neurotic Time Lord with a messiah complex, where would I go…?"

She retraced her steps through the commissary and back down the hall. If her information was good – mysterious lab, missing person – then Rose had no doubt that the Doctor would find his way down to the basement eventually. She only had to go that way herself and hope he met her there.

The world might have been different if Rose had gone straight down to the basement after talking to the Neil the Janitor. A life might have been saved and a whole dimension in time been destroyed, but she hadn't; she went to the conference room first and on her way back, she did not go down the hall toward Dr. Kuri's office. Instead, she turned left around the corner and as she did, an arm reached out and caught her around the waist, pulling her back into the shadows. A hand clapped over her mouth, silencing her angry cry.

.

Carmen delivered Dr. Kuri's folder to his office. The man himself was off somewhere, and she took that as a sign that she was meant to do what she did next.

She had worked with the man for only three days, but that was long enough to have learned his habits. If she had not been _only_ an intern, he might have been more careful. He might not have let her see where he kept the ring of metal keys for the file room. Dr. Kuri rarely went up there himself, and so many keys were simply too heavy to carry about on his person. Carmen put on her coat, took up her bag, listened carefully to be sure there were no footsteps coming down the hall outside, and then she ran to Dr. Kuri's desk, took the keys from the bottom drawer and stuffed them into her coat pocked to stop them jingling as she hurried out of the room.

Back at the elevator, she stopped to catch her breath. She would search the file room for evidence that she could present to Rose and her partner. Dr. Kuri must have something hidden there or why else would he have all those locks?

She was about to swipe her keycard to call the elevator when the lights flickered overhead. There was nothing unusual in that, the building was old and there had been a lot of power surges lately. More than one project drew on the local power grid and sometimes the system couldn't handle the load, but this felt different. The lights didn't fade out; they seemed to grow brighter.

Finally the elevator doors slid open, and Carmen stepped inside. She turned and reached out her hand to press the button for the second floor but as she turned, something caught her eye and she looked back out into the hall. Her jaw dropped, her eyes widened, and her heart stopped beating for a moment as she watched Mia step out of Dr. Kuri's office.

Carmen gasped. The elevator doors began to slide shut, but she shoved her shoulder between them and forced her way out again. Mia stood in the hall for a moment, straightening her coat and shaking back her hair, and then she tuned and with a look of dead determination, marched down the hall.

Had Mia been in Dr. Kuri's office all along? Like the dead tree, how could Carmen have missed seeing her there?

"Micky!" she cried, hurrying toward her girlfriend with tears in her eyes. "Where have you been? What happened? Why didn't you… call…?"

Mia gave no sign of recognition. She didn't even look at Carmen or acknowledge her. Carmen slowed her step, and then stopped and stared, too hurt to really believe that Mia was ignoring her. Sometimes, when she was too focused on a goal, she _seemed_ to be blind and deaf to all else.

"Micky? C'mon, tell me what happened?" Carmen put out her hand to catch Mia's arm and… watched as she walked right through it.

Carmen pulled back with a shout. Her fingers burned as if she'd touched a live wire. She stared at Mia, or the thing that looked like Mia, and realized that she could see through her, to the vague outline of the hallway on the other side. The image of Mia seemed to waver and fade out at the edges. Her white coat shimmered and her hair was a black smear as if it had been put together by something that had the idea of hair but didn't really have the patience to draw each individual strand.

Was that it, then? Not a ghost, but a hologram! She had seen them before, much smaller, of course, and simpler than this one, but wasn't that what Dr. Eriksson was working on? Developing realistic, life-sized holographic recordings. She hoped to one day record doctors performing surgery or engineers repairing advanced equipment so that students could learn from watching the 3D images. Had they recorded Mia?

And then, Carmen realized something that she should have seen first: Mia's coat, the clothes that she was wearing, she was dressed in the same outfit that the real Mia had been wearing the day she disappeared. If this were a holographic recording of Mia's last hours at Gateway…

Without thinking about what she was doing, Carmen hurried after the image – it was simpler to tell herself that it was hologram than to deal with the possibility that she was following Mia's ghost. The doppelganger was far ahead and already passing through the door to the stairwell. Literally, she passed _through_ the door. Carmen was slowed down by having to stop and open it for herself; by the time she had entered the stairwell and stood looking down from the landing, the image of Mia had disappeared.

Like everyone else at Gateway, Carmen had heard the rumors of a secret lab down in the basement. Unlike everyone else, she had not laughed off the story. She knew it to be true. On more than one occasion, Mia had let slip that she was going "downstairs" when they were already on the lowest level that most students were allowed to go. If Dr. Kuri had a lab down there, Mia would have had access to it; she had access to all his experiments.

The stairwell was empty, but Carmen thought that she heard footsteps below and a door being gently opened and then closed. Maybe it was Mia, or maybe it was someone else. It didn't matter. She had to know what had happened three nights ago.

She hurried down the stairs, automatically pulling out her keycard to swipe across the door lock. There was no response; no metallic chirp to let her know her card had been scanned. She put her shoulder against the door and it opened. There had been several large power surges that day; maybe one of them had overloaded the door lock? She hesitated for only a moment before she stepped down into the forbidden bowels of the Gateway Institute.

.

Rose cried out in angry surprise and threw an elbow backwards into her assailant. She heard a grunt and smelt the familiar scent of old leather and alien worlds.

The Doctor let go of her. "That hurt!" he hissed, rubbing the sore spot on his ribcage, just above his second heart.

"Don't grab me like that, then," she hissed back at him, then paused. "Why are we whispering?"

He put a finger to his lips and pointed back over his shoulder. The hallway behind them was dark except for a single square of yellow light fell from an open doorway a few yards from where they stood. If she listened carefully, she could just make out two voices arguing.

"I thought that Dr. McNeil might light to know that there were a few discrepancies in her personnel files," he said. "I followed her from her office, but she seems to be occupied at the moment. What did you find?"

Not, did you find anything? Rose thought with pride. He trusted that she would have found something good to bring back to him. "What would you say to a missing woman and a secret lab?" she said. He raised an eyebrow and she filled him in on the few details that she had, finishing with, "So the company line is that Mia Chen resigned and went home, but I think Carmen was right. There's something strange going on around here, and Dr. Kuri-Hunt is at the bottom of it."

The Doctor nodded. "A hidden lab, that fits what I found in the computer files. This place is absorbing way more energy than it needs for the sort of research they're promoting in their marketing materials. They could power a whole city with the power that's pumping through these walls!"

"Marketing? Was Corporate PR a required course at Gallifrey University?" Rose joked.

"I wouldn't know. I took Bistromathics that year. Give me your phone."

She handed him the device and watched as he paged through the hundreds of employee profiles that he had downloaded from the Gateway computers. Rose had completely forgotten about them, but it wouldn't have mattered. There was little information on Dr. Kuri that wasn't faked or forged. The Doctor had seen that much already. He was looking for someone else.

"Chen. Why is that name familiar? Ah, here she is."

Rose looked over the Doctor's shoulder. A pretty, Chinese woman looked up at her from the small photo on the screen. She had short black hair, a confident smile and dark, serious eyes, but there was something a little too serious in the way all the pieces came together. This was a woman determined to go places, and Rose found it difficult to picture her having any sort of relationship with the less-than-attractive, self-conscious Carmen Ortiz.

"When did you say that she disappeared?"

"Carmen said it was three days ago. And the janitor I spoke with said the same thing. She was here one night, and then she was gone and all her things were packed up the same night."

"Places like this always follow procedure. Lots of big, bright red tape. They might be able to disappear her from the building, but they couldn't erase her from the computer system, not without raising a whole lot of flags. They would have done things by the book." He searched the files. "If Ms. Chen resigned, there should be something like… this!" He turned the phone toward Rose and pointed to the bottom of the screen. The last line of Mia Chen's employment record included her letter of resignation, termination paperwork from HR and an exit interview.

"So she did resign. She's not missing?" Rose said, surprised. She really thought they had been on to something

"Check the date stamp," the Doctor said smugly. "According to the computer. Today is March the 15th."

Rose had to squint to make out the tiny date at the bottom of Mia Chen's exit interview. "March the 7th," she read aloud, "but that was more than a week ago. She wouldn't still be working here after an exit interview. They only do those on your last day!"

"But, if you wanted to stop people asking questions… A month from now, who but the computer will remember what day she left? Your Janitor friend wouldn't."

Rose remembered the look on Carmen's face when she talked about Mia, the worry in her eyes, and it seemed unlikely that Carmen would forget the day her girlfriend disappeared. "Carmen would remember it."

"Yes," the Doctor took the phone back again. "And Carmen's full name was...?"

"Santiago Ortiz," Rose said, helpfully, looking over his shoulder as he typed in the name.

The Doctor frowned. "Carmen Santiago..." He glanced at Rose, who shook her head.

"San _tiago_ ," she said, " _not_ Sandiego, and she won't thank you for bringing it up."

"You said she was working for Dr. Kuri now?" He pulled up another personnel file. "She was transferred to his project the day after Mia left…"

Rose frowned. Did that mean that Carmen was in on the disappearance of her friend? Had she been lying to Rose all along? Or, if Dr. Kuri had requested the transfer, he might be trying to keep close the one person who would question what had happened to his missing assistant. If that were true, then Carmen could be in danger, too.

Rose turned her attention back to the conversation taking place inside the office. They were arguing now, and their voices were getting louder. She knew that the woman was Dr. McNeil, but wasn't at all surprised when she recognized the man as Dr. Kuri-Hunt himself.

"…It is too dangerous," Dr. McNeil said urgently. "You are moving too fast, Markus. It is not safe, and I've had to explain _three_ brown-outs to Dr. Sung this week alone! First thing tomorrow, I'm pulling the plug. We cannot risk another power surge like the one that blew out the grid last week. OSHA showed up today. Their agents will be poking their noses around for a few days, and…"

"What another investigation, so soon? Why wasn't I told?"

"They're looking for safety violations, but we've got the radiation under control now. I've changed the computer protocols, so there's no reason for them to go down to the basement. As far as anyone knows, it's just empty space, but even if they start asking the right people the wrong questions… shut down your machine, Dr. Kuri. We can worry about this once they're gone."

"You think it is a coincidence that they are here now?" Dr. Kuri demanded. "Only days after Mia's accident! I do not care if they say they are from OSHA. Even small dogs will bite. How many are here? Who are they?"

There was a moment's silence and Rose could almost hear Dr. McNeil's suspicions being raised. "He only said that he was a doctor. He had surprisingly high clearance for such a ridiculous person, but his assistant was dressed very unprofessionally. I left him in the conference room, looking over the personnel files." Dr. McNeil's heels clicked against the floor, approaching the door.

Rose glanced down at her clothes, but before she could decide whether to feel insulted or not, The Doctor had pulled her around the corner and was ushering her down the hall. "That's our cue to leave," he said, opting for a hurried but nonchalant stride and Rose, being much shorter than he was, had to jog to keep up.

"So, where do we go now?" she asked eagerly, "To the secret lab?"

"It was her," the Doctor said, just as eagerly and not hearing her question. "It was Mia Chen who screamed. It must have been. The Tardis is designed to pick up distress signals; it must have picked up her voice and routed it through the com. She brought us here and now we can save her!"

He pushed forward, but Rose stopped short, holding onto him. "Wait, Doctor, you can't!" she said.

"Can't? Who says I can't!" He turned on her.

"The giant, hungry bat-monsters eating everyone, remember!? The paradox will rip apart the world."

"This is different," he said, shaking off her hand.

"How?"

"It just is."

"No, tell me how this is different," she insisted. "We're here because we heard a scream. We don't know that it was Mia, but if it was, and if you stop whatever happens to her, then nothing will have brought us here. You can't change your own past. _You_ taught me that. It isn't different this time just because _you want it to be_."

The Doctor turned his back on her. She was right. She knew that she was right and what was worse was that _he_ knew that she was right.

"We'll investigate, Doctor, like we always do," she said him, putting an uncertain hand on his arm. "We'll find out what's going on here and we'll stop it. We'll make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else, but we can't just… I mean, if we don't… You can't save everyone."

He laughed at that unhappy joke. Did she think he didn't already know that? How many people he couldn't save.

When the Doctor turned around again, he was smiling. He didn't fool her, but the smile was the important thing, and what he said next. "Right. Let's have a look at that secret, underground lair, shall we?"

He laughed, and she laughed with relief. He held out his hand, and she…

"You two! Stop right there." Dr. McNeil came storming down the hall toward them.

.

Carmen stepped through the door into the gloomy basement and looked around nervously.

The lowest level of Gateway was as large as its upper floors with a dozen hallways branching off in all directions from the main elevator bank, but unlike the occupied upstairs, no one had been down here for years, not even to sweep up the dust. A clear path lay before her, footsteps streaked across the grime, and a white lab coat lay kicked into the corner nearby. Carmen picked it up absently and looped it over her arm. She knew that she wasn't supposed to be down here.

She walked slowly up the hallway, following the dusty path. The security lights were on, but most of the bulbs had burnt out long ago and never been replaced. The ones that were left were dim and hummed as if the power that ran through them had to fight for every inch. The place would have been at home on a ghost haunt tour, and it did not help that at every turn, Carmen expected to see the flickering image of Mia's hologram beckoning to her. She walked past an overturned trolley gathering dust against one wall, and a broken corkboard hanging by one nail on the other.

"Hello? Is somebody down there?" Her voice echoed eerily against the empty walls. She thought she heard farther down the hall. "Micky, is that you?" she called.

The silence was growing louder in her ears. She could hear her own heart pounding in her chest. She took another step forward, and then another. She tipped her head to one side and listened, but with so many empty halls, it might only be her own echoing footsteps that she followed. The dusty footprints seemed to lead nowhere, and she was about to turn away when she heard, or thought that she heard, there at the edge of hearing, the whir of cooling fans and spark of electrical equipment. She noticed a brighter light shimmering between the gap of two heavy doors at the far end of the hallway where she stood now. Could that be Dr. Kuri's secret lab?

"Micky?" she whispered. "Mia?" Every part of her body screamed at her to turn and run, run far away, but that light… that bright and beautiful light. She had been here before, and would be again. The feeling of déjà vu was too strong to resist and she walked forward.

Before she knew what she was doing, Carmen was at the door. Her hand was on the doorknob. The strange sound seemed to vibrate through the metal, up her arm and into her heart. If the electrical hum had been on the edge of hearing, then beyond that edge, lingering on the other side was a different sound, like a song, like a scream. It was all so familiar, and the red and orange and yellow light called out to her. It drew her on.

She opened the door and stepped through, letting it fall shut behind her. The click of the latch echoed back down the empty, dusty corridor. And then…

.

One floor above, the lights flashed like lightening and the Doctor covered his ears. He doubled over as a piercing scream echoed up and down the halls.

"No. No! NO! We're too late!" he shouted.

Dr. McNeil stared at him as if he had gone mad. Even Rose looked around in confusion. She had seen the lights flicker as the power surged, but she couldn't hear anything and didn't understand why he was shouting at her. Why he had fallen back against the wall, holding his head and cowering as if under some invisible assault.

"Doctor, what's wrong? What's happening?" she asked, looking at Dr. McNeil.

But Dr. McNeil had no sympathy. "You two are not from OSHA," she said, indifferent to the Doctor's suffering. "If _any_ government agency would hire you, I'll tear up my credentials and all five diplomas. Who sent you?"

"We're too late. Rose, can't you hear it?" the Doctor cried, still covering his ears. "She's screaming. Whatever happened in the Tardis, it's happening now!"

"Where?" Rose asked.

"Where?" the Doctor repeated. He fumbled for the sonic screwdriver in his pocket. Whatever had knocked him down at first seemed to be fading. He stood up and spun around, aiming the screwdriver at the air. His face was still haggard, but his look was determined.

"There!" he shouted, pointing back the way they had come. "There's still a trace of it. Come on!" He held out his hand, and Rose took it without hesitation. They ran down the hall, the sonic screwdriver leading the way, and left Dr. McNeil in the dust.

"Now, wait a minute!" She shouted after them. She pinched the com button on her jacket. "Security? Security!" She demanded, but heard only static. Whatever surge had affected the lights must also have disabled her intercom. "Damn it, Markus!" she cursed as she started down the hall after the Doctor and Rose. She would have to stop them herself.

.

Rose and the Doctor raced down the halls, turning left and right, following the invisible trail that the sonic screwdriver's sensors picked out for them. They reached a doorway that led to the stairwell, and the sonic's lights flared.

"Down," the Doctor said, and threw open the door.

They were only one flight up from the basement, but he flew down the stairs, taking them three at a time while Rose followed at a slower and safer pace. She caught up with him when he hit the door. It was locked. He put his shoulder into it but bounced off without leaving a mark.

Rose expected him to use the screwdriver again, but he turned on her and aimed the device up and over her shoulder. "You!" he shouted. "Open this door now!"

Startled, Rose looked up the stairs and was surprised to see Dr. McNeil had kept up with them. The woman was out of breath and her perfect hair was flying, but she made good time despite her pencil skirt and sensible heels.

"You are trespassing here," the woman said, smoothing her hair and stepping down the stairs towards them with a smug smile. She thought the locked door had defeated them. "This floor is off limits to everyone. Leave now, and maybe I will delay reporting your presence to the authorities, long enough for you to get out of town, anyway."

She was still smiling right up until the Doctor took hold of her shoulders and slammed her back against the wall. "You will open that door now, Dr. McNeil," he said, his words ground out through clenched teeth. Rose couldn't remember seeing him so angry.

"I will _not_!" Dr. McNeil told him.

Rose was afraid for the woman and what the Doctor would do, but he only stared at her and then aimed his screwdriver back over his shoulder. There was a whir and a click as the door unlocked. "From here on, I hold _you_ personally responsible for whatever has happened to that poor girl. I am going to find out, and I hope for your sake, Doctor, that Mia Chen is still alive."

He turned and walked through the open door. Rose hurried after him, glancing at Dr. McNeil as she passed. The woman looked downright terrified.

The basement was empty, a labyrinth of identical gray walls, but the sonic screwdriver was still chirping quietly so they followed it until they found a trail of fresh footprints in the dust.

"Doctor, look."

He nodded and they proceeded more quickly but also with more care.

The overturned trolley, the broken bulletin board, all was exactly as it had been for twenty years or more, as they approached the glowing doors at the end of the hall. The lights overhead flickered and flared, the ones that hadn't already burnt out under the onslaught of static electricity. Rose felt as if her hair was standing on end. The Doctor was nearly in front of the doors when they burst open and Dr. Kuri stumbled out. He slammed the doors shut behind him and turned around. He sputtered as he saw Rose and The Doctor bearing down on him, and Dr. McNeil following them.

"Chelsey! What is this? Who are these people? They are… No! No! You cannot go in there!"

The Doctor pushed Dr. Kuri out of the way and threw open the doors to the lab. Rose followed him inside but stopped short only a few steps into the room.

"What is it?" she asked, breathless. "It's beautiful."

"It's an abomination," the Doctor said angrily.

On one side, two steps led up to a bank of computers and sensors along the wall. Like an electrical nest of wires and screens, everything was built up around a single desk and chair. Coils of paper were spread out over everything, but that wasn't what caught Rose's eye.

In the center of the room, surrounded by a low railing, a huge machine was grinding away. A round, metal tube, like an inverse funnel, hung from the ceiling and poured out a million strands of red and orange and yellow static. On the floor, a giant, black claw spun endlessly, its many fingers gathering up the strands of light and throwing them back again until they flowed together in a boiling burning ball of liquid energy, eight feet high and at least as wide across. The spinning light seemed to generate its own gravitational field that pulled at Rose's cloths and hair. She could feel the sphere calling to her, drawing her towards it. Something deep down inside her desperately wanted to touch that light, to feel its waves flowing over her skin. She took hold of the railing near the computer banks to steady herself.

The machine was beautiful, but it was also terrible. Suspended in the center of the ball of burning electricity, was the body of a woman, hanging motionless. She was bent forward as if she were falling backwards into the light, through a tear in the fabric of the world, and her arms stretched out toward Rose and the Doctor, pleading with them to pull her in. Her face was frozen in a mask of surprise and fear; her mouth was open in a silent scream.

Rose swallowed the sickness that rose up in her throat. "It's not Mia Chen. Doctor, that's Carmen."

* * *

 **So, you get a really long chapter this time. Yay! Just my way of apologizing to those of you who were fooled by my aborted attempt to post a chapter this past weekend. It was a terrible rough draft that should never have seen the light of the internet. After all this time, I have yet to learn to EDIT properly.**

 **Let's play a game! Who can find the HG2G reference in this chapter?**

 **-Paint**


	5. Chapter 5

**Nothing in the Doctor Whoniverse belongs to me.**

* * *

Rose looked up at the tortured figure of Carmen Ortiz hanging in the middle of the tiny, man-made sun. Her expression was frozen in the same riot of emotions that had probably filled her last moments as she fell into the electrical field, but something in her eyes made Rose uneasy. There as no fear in them. She seemed to be watching.

Rose tore her eyes away and looked at the Doctor instead. He was staring at Carmen, and she knew what he was thinking, that this was his fault. They were too late. And it didn't matter if saving her would have created a paradox, if it would have destroy the world and the whole timeline that they lived in. If he had had the chance, he would have saved this woman. If he had run faster, thought quicker, landed the Tardis a fraction of a second sooner or later than he had, he might have been able to save her.

She reached for his hand but he didn't see her. He moved before she could touch him, stretching out his hand toward the distant figure of Carmen Ortiz. Rose tried not to feel disappointed. The outer edges of the energy field crackled and sparks danced hot across the Doctor's fingertips, and he pulled back. Even at a distance, they could feel the heat of the electrical storm that filled half the room and was barely contained within the rotating arms of the machine.

"I'm sorry," the Doctor whispered.

"Can she hear us?" Rose asked.

"I doubt it," he said, louder, pretending that he hadn't said what he knew she had heard him say.

Rose found it hard to believe that anyone could survive inside that ball of burning fire, but those eyes. It was like an old painting. Nothing moved, but Carmen's eyes seemed to follow as the Doctor pulled himself out of his anguish and leaped up the narrow, metal stairs that led to the bank of computers opposite the electrical field.

Dr. McNeil had chased them into the lab. She had also stopped short in surprise at the sight of the woman suspended in a ball of light, but when she saw the Doctor move toward the equipment, her thoughts shot back to the reputation of Gateway and the secrecy of her most classified project. She tried the intercom one her collar again, but no luck, and Dr. Kuri had run off. She would have to deal with these intruders herself.

"Get down from there!" she ordered, striding toward the Doctor and the computer banks.

Rose stepped back and spread her arms across the stairs, blocking the Head of Gateway and bracing herself, but as angry as she was, so far Dr. McNeil seemed reluctant to take physical action against them.

"That equipment is sensitive. And expensive!" she protested.

"You managed to throw a whole human being into it and it seems to be working fine." The Doctor looked over the rows of buttons and dials and fiddly little levers, all unlabeled, of course. It was just like the Tardis console only exactly, completely different.

"You have no authority," Dr. McNeil shouted.

"I'm trying to save a woman's life. That is all the authority I need!" One of the screens was already turned on, displaying a stream of numbers and lines like a seismograph measuring the energy field's voltage, resonance and a dozen other factors. The numbers spiked across the screen so fast that they were no longer individual lines but a mangled scribble of red.

The Doctor stared at the measurements. They didn't make sense. The whole damned machine didn't make sense. Frustrated, the Doctor ran a hand over his hair and stared again, harder, at the readings, trying to see past the individual numbers. There was something familiar about the way the power spikes grouped together, two beats at a time, four beats in a group… like a heartbeat racing at impossible speed.

No. Not _like_ a heartbeat…

"It _is_ a heartbeat!" he said, standing up and looking over the computers into the heart of the energy field. "She's still alive, Rose. The computer... it's measuring her body's electrical impulses. It's not monitoring the energy field. It's monitoring _her_!"

Dr. McNeal opened her mouth to protest, but she closed it again without speaking. She glanced back over her shoulder toward the doors to the lab and for the first time, Rose wondered where Dr. Kuri had gone. He had been just outside in the hallway when they entered, but he hadn't followed them in.

"Doctor, can you get her out of there?" she asked. The room felt too small for her with the molten ball of electricity so close, and she couldn't look directly at the field, at Carmen's pleading eyes, without feeling sick to her stomach.

"I don't know," the Doctor said. "The whole process is focused entirely on her. I can't get it to do anything else. Dr. Kuri is an expert in paleomagnetism. That is a static-volt monitor, and that is an electrical field stabilizer, but any fool knows magnetic fields aren't… they don't do whatever this is doing." He looked at Dr. McNeil. "What is it _for_?" he demanded.

She pursed her lips and wouldn't answer him. He sighed, frustrated and impatient. This was taking too much time and it wouldn't be long before Gateway's security team realized that something was wrong and came looking for them. Half the computer consul was covered in paper clutter, and he pushed it aside, spilling it onto the floor. He turned away, but a piece of yellow paper caught his eye; it was covered with a sprawling, spidery handwriting, but there was one word printed larger than the others. He tipped his head to one side to read it.

"Struldbrug?" he muttered. "Markus Kuri-Hunt? That's not a German name, that's… Swift!"

Dr. McNeil gave a start. "Who are you? What exactly are you hoping to accomplish?" She spoke quickly to distract him from the notes, and if Rose had not barred her way, she probably would have leaped up to tear them from his hands. "Dr. Kuri's work is far beyond anything that you could ever hope to understand."

"Do you?" the Doctor asked, still staring at the paper.

"What?"

"Do you understand it? Do you have any idea what you've done?"

Rose looked back over her shoulder. She could hear in his voice that whatever the machine was, he had figured it out, and he didn't like it.

"Of course I understand it. I personally approve _every_ project that carries Gateway's name," Dr. McNeil said, sneering at him. "It is an electromagnetic energy converter that taps into the friction field generated between the earth's spinning magnetic field and the dust particles of cold space. The excess energy is siphoned off and stored in an off-site generator for…"

"Ha!" The Doctor shouted, turning away. "You haven't a clue. You've cut a hole in one of the most powerful forces in the universe and you think it's nothing but a fancy solar panel or wind turbine!" He reached for the keyboard.

"Step away from the controls, Doctor."

Rose had been watching the Doctor, but now she turned back to see Dr. Kuri standing in the doorway. His voice was clear and calm, but the red light of the electrical field reflected in his eyes and along the polished length of the barrel of his gun. Dr. McNeil smiled and stepped back from Rose to stand beside her colleague.

"Ah, Doctor…?" Rose said, slowly raising her hands over her head.

The Doctor's hands hovered over the computer controls. "She's dead, isn't she, Dr. Kuri," he said, without looking around.

"But you have said so yourself, Ms. Ortiz is alive," Dr. Kuri said. "She is perfectly safe, if a bit… restrained, at the moment. I said, step away!"

The Doctor clenched his fists and spun around. "I was talking about Mia Chen," he said, sliding down the narrow railing beside the stairs. He slid past Rose, who kept her hands up; the Doctor stepped up to Dr. Kuri, seemingly indifferent to the gun in his hand, but he was careful to put himself between it and Rose.

"Your assistant, Mia Chen," he said. "All that rubbish about electromagnetic energy converters that you've been feeding Dr. McNeil, it's all a sham. Your colleagues may have swallowed the lie, but not Mia. She worked with you. She realized what you were really up to, and she threatened to expose you, to tell everyone the risks you were taking. You couldn't let her do that, so you killed her."

The Doctor's voice was shaking with anger, but Dr. Kuri only smiled and shook his head. "Mia Chen resigned many days ago," he said. "You have seen our personnel files. It was all very well documented. Her poor parents did die recently, in an auto accident. But even you cannot suggest that I had anything to do with that sad business. Mia decided to go home to look after her brother…"

"That's a lie and you know it!" the Doctor shouted. His arms were shaking as he fought the urge to throttle the man, but the gun. There was always a gun.

"As for poor Ms. Ortiz," Dr. Kuri went on as if the Doctor had not interrupted. "It was a terrible accident. Dr. McNeil and I were talking not half an hour ago. She asked me to turn off my equipment for a little while. Of course, I came down here to comply, and what should I find but that little dustpan-pusher snooping around the power stacks of my field generator. Gateway is very clear with all new interns that this floor is off limits. But a classified project is a great temptation to any corporate spy. My unexpected arrival must have startled her and she slipped into the energy field."

The Doctor turned to Dr. McNeil. He knew he would get nowhere with Dr. Kuri. "If it was an accident then let me help her."

"Your presence seems rather to be hindering our efforts," Dr. McNeil told him, but she seemed less certain than her colleague.

"She is perfectly safe," Dr. Kuri said again. "And I have every intention of releasing her, just as soon as I have completed my studies."

The Doctor stared at him, the last piece falling into place. "You were the one monitoring her vital signs. You turned the sensors on her after she fell in. This is all just another experiment to you!"

He lunged at the man, but Dr. Kuri fired his gun. The bullet hit the wall to one side, just above Rose's left shoulder. She covered her head as a rain of plaster dust pelted her face and hair. The Doctor jumped back again, throwing his arm in front of her.

Dr. Kuri smiled. "Please, no violence here," he said calmly. "I am not glad to threaten your young assistant with an early death."

Furious but unable to do anything about it, The Doctor raised his hands over his head. "You won't get away with this," he said. "Two women are missing. People will start asking questions."

"People are always asking questions, but they won't ask about her. That woman has no family, and Mia's brother is miles away." Dr. Kuri's words were confident, but he frowned as he looked at the frozen figure of Carmen. A missing woman was easy to hide, but Carmen wasn't missing yet, and anyone who came looking for her wouldn't have too much trouble once they got past the front doors. "Perhaps you are right," he said slowly. "It may be several days before we can remove the body. Perhaps it would be better for us all if there were no questions asked, not yet…"

He aimed the gun at the Doctor's chest midway between his two hearts. The Doctor braced himself, determined that, if he was going to be shot, at least he could buy a few precious seconds for Rose to escape.

"That's enough, Markus." Dr. McNeil's firm voice broke the tension. She was bristling with indignation. "Gateway is _my_ institute. Spies are bad enough, but I will _not_ allow murder to be committed upon these premises!"

"And if they talk?" he demanded. "That tall one knows too much."

"Let them talk. There is no one to listen. Gateway is far too important to this community. Without evidence, they are no threat, and the only evidence is inside this building. Markus, give me the gun. You look foolish holding that thing."

Dr. Kuri hesitated. He seemed to be considering the possibility of shooting them both now, and perhaps Dr. McNeil with them, but he sighed and handed over the gun. "Get them out of my lab, Chelsey. Do as you like after that, but get them out of here. I have work to do."

"Dr. McNeil, please," the Doctor tried one last time. "You can put an end to this madness. It's a miracle that Carmen has survived this long, but the field is unstable. You cannot leave her in there. You have to let me…" He stared at her in amazement as she aimed Dr. Kuri's gun at him.

"That is where you are wrong, Doctor. I do not _have_ to let you do anything. I will not condone murder, but also, I will not have corporate spies roaming about my institute, interfering with my employees and their work." She nodded toward the door. "Now, if you please."

Hands in the air, the Doctor and Rose were marched out of Dr. Kuri's lab. Rose looked back once toward the twisted body of Carmen Ortiz. She saw Dr. Kuri hurry up the stairs to the computer banks to see what damage the Doctor had done, and then the doors slammed shut; he didn't look back at them.

Dr. McNeil pinched the collar of her jacket again. "Security?" she demanded. A crackling voice answered her. "Finally! Yes, two spies have infiltrated at the basement level, a man and a girl. Please be so kind as to come and get them. And tell Randall that I want a full report on my desk first thing tomorrow. I want to know exactly how these people entered my building in the first place!"

A static-filled apology was cut off in mid apol- and she urged the Doctor and Rose on down the dusty hallways.

"You don't know what you're doing," the Doctor told her. "If you don't shut down that machine, it will tear a hole in the fabric of time and space. It could destroy whole universes."

"It really is a shame that you and Markus don't along, Doctor," McNeil told him. "He can be just as melodramatic as you. And, much like you, he has a habit of missing what is right in front of his nose."

They were nearly at the stairwell and the Doctor could see half a dozen security guards standing in the doorway. Even under orders, they were reluctant to enter the basement level that was so forcefully off limits. Betting that they wouldn't cross the threshold without a direct order, the Doctor turned to face Dr. McNeil.

"You've got five diplomas," he hissed. "You're not nearly as fooled as you pretend to be. If that thing is an electromagnetic energy converter, then I'm an Ameglian Major cow. There's enough electricity in that thing to power a small sun, but there are no generators to store it. What is all that power for? What is so important that you'd kill one woman and risk another's life?"

"Immortality, Doctor," she said. "Only immortality."

She gestured to the guards who came out of the stairwell. One guard took Rose's arm and ushered her ahead of them up the stairs; the other five took hold of the Doctor. He fought them every step of the way, shouting at Dr. McNeil, but the head of Gateway turned on her sensible heels and walked calmly back down the hall toward the lab. The guards dragged the Doctor bodily up the stairs to the ground floor and then up the main hall to the reception desk. Rose was pulled along behind him. She had hoped that with the Doctor's commotion, she would have a chance to slip away, but there was none.

They reached the main doors, and the guards threw the Doctor out of the building and into a soggy snow bank. Rose hurried after him with a quick, "Watch it!" snapped back over her shoulder at the guard who tried to give her a shove as well. "I'm going, aren't I?"

The doors slammed behind her and several thick deadbolts clicked into place. She turned to the Doctor and tried to offer him a hand up, but he waved her away and pulled himself to his feet. His leather jacket was spotted with salt and melt water streamed through his hair. It was dark and cold, but he was shivering with rage.

"Those fools have no idea! It's not just the girl. They'll blow up this whole planet and half the galaxy before they realize that's no fountain of youth they're playing with!"

"It's alright, Doctor," Rose said, putting her hand on his arm. "We'll get back inside, tonight when they've gone, or tomorrow while they're busy. Carmen was alive. If Dr. Kuri is monitoring her life signs, then he'll want to _keep_ her alive. She'll be safe for a few hours."

The Doctor shook his head. He had gotten a look at Gateway's security system while he was browsing their computer files. It was state-of-the-art on any planet; it would take more than the sonic screwdriver to get them back into that building. "We would need an army to break into that building now that they're expecting us. If we try, we'll set off a dozen alarms."

Rose guessed that now was not the time to suggest they look for a broken window with a tree sticking out of it. "We've got one other problem to worry about," she said.

"Only one?" He wiped the melted snow off his face.

"Gateway Institute is full of scientists, right? So how long do you think it'll take them to realize they've got a Tardis parked in the broom closet?"

* * *

 **Well, I was walking home from work today, listening to The Naked And Famous, trying to psych myself up to finally write the last chapter of my Hobbit fic, when this cute little sparrow comes flying through the air... straight at my head! I seriously felt her wing grazed my temple before I ducked.**

 **So that was my day. How was yours?**

 **-Paint**


	6. Chapter 6

**Nothing in the Doctor Whoniverse belongs to me, until I find a way to steal my own time machine and go back to the 60s to sell the BBC on my totally not stolen idea.**

* * *

The Doctor stomped down the street, pushing his way through the snow – six inches deep and soaking cold at his ankles. Rose hurried to keep up. She had given up trying to understand his angry mutterings. Gateway was locked against them, and even though the sonic screwdriver could deal handily with any (metal) lock, it was little help against the guards and security cameras that they would find inside. This wasn't one of their usual adventures; they had no easy enemy to fight, no clear answer to the problem at hand. There were no plastic mannequins come to life; no aliens, real or fake, trying to take over the world; no ghostly apparitions begging for release.

Rose frowned. She had a feeling she knew why the Doctor was angry, why this adventure was hitting so close to home, and had little to do with their helplessness in the face of an impenetrable brick wall.

She had always wondered, always questioned somewhere deep down, what exactly had happened in that cellar in Cardiff. The Doctor had promised that he wouldn't leave Gwyneth while she was in danger, and Rose believed him when he said afterwards that she'd been dead from the moment she stepped into the arch. But Rose also knew that the young servant woman might never have been in danger if the Doctor hadn't encourage her to use her psychic abilities to open the rift, a gateway for the Gelth. The Doctor knew it too, and it didn't matter if Gwyneth was dead or alive when she struck that match. She had been trapped in the rift, and the Doctor couldn't save her.

And now this place, another Gateway, another young woman trapped between two worlds, and it didn't matter whether the Doctor put her there or not. He was determined not to let this one die.

Lost in thought, Rose's steps had slowed and now she had to skip a few paces to catch up with him. "Doctor, wait," she called, tired of both the walking and the mood he was in. "Look, there's a pub still open. Come on, Doctor, it's freezing out here and I'm starving!" She caught his arm and pulled him out of the road.

The pub was actually a small bar and grill restaurant. Old and out of date, the place was still clinging to its turn-of-the-century décor; the heavy wood and metal motif harkened back to the North Dakota oil boom of the early 2000s, before fossil fuels went the way of the dinosaurs and solar batteries took over. These days, of course, solar batteries were falling out of vogue. The climate wars were being waged on view screens all across the globe, but that could last only so long. The human race was hungry for energy, and if Dr. Kuri promised them a brand new, untapped, sustainable power source, what capitalist government would stand in his way?

Or, so the Doctor had said, muttering under his breath, while they were seated at a small table in the corner near the bar, handed menus by an indifferent server in blue shirt and stained apron, and looked over the selection. Rose tried to remember what they called chips in this country, but decided to order a chicken salad sandwich instead. The Doctor took tea and nothing else. Rose smiled; even she knew that American restaurants couldn't brew a cuppa if their liquor license depended on it. She asked for coffee instead. It was going to be a long night.

The bar was used to late-working researchers and hard-drinking students of the Institute, and no one batted an eye at the two of them when they entered. An elderly man and woman were seated together at a short table near the door, half a dozen young men stood clustered around the bar, jeering at the late-night, live broadcast of some ballgame being played half a world away. Another man sat alone in the shadows at the other end of the bar, staring mournfully into his beer mug. Rose watched him for a moment; he was the closest to them, and the only person who could possibly hear what they were talking about, but the man was so lost in his own unhappy world that she didn't think he heard even the raucous sports fans, let alone their quiet conversation.

She turned her attention back to the Doctor. He had finished his history lesson – Rose began to suspect that it was more of a nervous tic for him to show off that way, rather than a deliberate effort to be insufferable – and he tapped his fingers erratically on the table, watching her expectantly.

"I'm sorry, what?" she said. She hadn't heard him ask anything.

"Isn't this where you say, let's try… something?" he said, spreading out his hands to encompass all her hypothetical suggestions.

"You shot down my last idea," she said, but she was glad to see that he had finally moved on from his sulk and was ready to take action again.

"We've got to find a way back into Gateway," she said. "I'll look out for guards while you get Carmen out of that energy, time field thingy. Once she's safe, we blow up the equipment, erase the computer hard drives to destroy their backup files, then we nip back up to the Tardis and disappear. They'll never know we were here."

The Doctor smiled fondly, and then he frowned.

"You can't get her out, can you?" Rose said, seeing the look in his eye.

"What? Yes. Maybe… Probably, if I had the… time." He leaned toward her, looking at her intently. "Why did you say that?"

"Say what?"

"You said _time_ -energy field. Why?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. She just looked… frozen in there, not moving or blinking or anything. And those stasis pods we found, you said the seed was trapped in a time loop. What if Dr. Kuri was working on both projects? If Carmen is frozen in time… Dr. McNeal said they're looking for immortality."

The Doctor stared at the bits of stem floating in his mug of tea. "She's not frozen in time," he said. "Not frozen. Those computers were monitoring her vital signs. It's measuring her heartbeat, but not beats-per-minute; her pulse was being measured in nanoseconds."

"So she's scared," Rose said, and then she realized what he was saying. "But that's not possible. A human heart beating as fast as that, it would explode."

"Unless it wasn't," he said, smiling at her confusion. "It's not an energy field, Rose, not even a time-energy field." He looked down at his tea instead of at her. "It shouldn't be possible, but somehow they've tapped into the Time Vortex itself. That machine, it really is an electromagnetic energy converter, or at least that's what it used to be. Most people have given up magnetics by now. The energy is too weak for anything but parlor tricks, but somehow, Dr. Kuri must have altered the locator circuits on the field generator. He was trying to tap the Earth's magnetic field, but he found an opening into the Time Vortex instead. And it's my fault."

He sat back and looked at her with haunted eyes. "It's all my fault."

"Doctor, we just got here. It's not…"

"We just got here, yes, but I've come to Earth so many times, materialized out of the Time Vortex hundreds… no, thousands of times over the years. If the interface is weakening, how do I know it's not me that's weakened it? It's my fault."

Rose sighed. No, it wasn't, she knew, not this time. But he wouldn't believe her if she said that. "It doesn't matter _how_ it happened, Doctor. Time field, energy field, none of that matters. How long can Carmen live inside that machine?"

"She shouldn't be alive at all. The energy field that Dr. Kuri has created, it's like a bubble sitting on top of a bubble." He spread his hands out on the table. "You see, there are two adjacent time continuums running side by side but at different rates. The Time Vortex is the… no, wait, there are three bubbles. One inside the other, and the other outside them both… You understand?"

She shook her head.

He sighed and ran his hands over his face. Sometimes it was so much easier _not_ have to explain these things to someone else. "Look," he dipped his fingers into his mug of lukewarm tea and began drawing on the table. "This bubble is our timeline, where we are now. This bubble here, on top of that one, is the Time Vortex – only it's not a bubble, it's a more like a long tunnel or, no, an inverse funnel, a maelstrom that loops infinitely back into itself…" He smeared a few more lines.

"Back to the point, Doctor," Rose interrupted. "Where's the third bubble?"

"Hm? Right. The Time Vortex, here." He swiped his wet fingers along the side of the first circle and then drew a second, smaller circle at the intersection of the two. "The third bubble, Dr. Kuri's energy field, is this. It's a piece of the Time Vortex pulled into _this_ timeline and twisted off. The magnetic field generator is designed to contain a large amount of free-range energy within a set radius of neutral space." He saw Rose was beginning to look confused again and sighed, "Within the circle of the energy field, the bubble, if we must continue this ridiculous metaphor. But if that bubble were to pop…" He wiped a smear through the swirls of tea on the table.

"…the Time Vortex would open into this world," Rose said. "What happens then?"

"Nothing," he said.

"What, nothing at all?"

"Quite literally, nothing. At all. Poof. Possibly the implosion would be limited to this corner of space, a few dozen galaxies, a few million lightyears, but who knows? Once the tear is open, it could spread along the whole length of the Vortex until there's nothing left. All of time and space, poof."

Rose sat back in her chair. You would think that after a dozen or so times, saving the world would get less exciting, less frightening, but it didn't. Someone was building a doomsday machine, and the only two people who could stop it were blocked by a single locked door. And twenty or so guards with thirty or so guns. And a state-of-the-art security system. But who was she to quibble of something like that. They were stuck.

"Doctor," she said slowly. "You said that Mia Chen was dead?"

He looked up but didn't speak.

"Are you sure?"

He nodded. "I think that Mia went into the energy field just like Carmen did."

"But Carmen is alive. So if she's…"

"But she shouldn't be," the Doctor interrupted. "I told you, you can have two adjacent time continuums running side by side. We are in one, Carmen is in the other. Hers is going faster than ours, but something, I don't know what, is holding her in place, keeping her safe like the tree in the stasis field, but the time _around_ her is still moving. She should have been dead before she crossed the interface.

He shook his head. "Crossing from one time continuum to the other, it creates a sort-of whiplash effect. If you're going from a slower continuum to a faster one, you age forward into dust; if you go from faster to slower time, it's like being flattened across a brick wall. In theory, anyway. Obviously, no one's survived long enough to find out," he laughed uncomfortably.

"It's basic temporal physics," he said, looking down at the smeared tea soaking into the table. "Without a field-interface stabilizer, you can't cross from one continuum to… the… other…"

Rose looked up as his words trailed off. His eyes had widened and had a wild look in them. She knew that look. He had figured it out.

"Doctor, what…?

"Excuse me?" A voice spoke from beside their table. Rose looked up and recognized the young man who had been sitting alone at the bar. He was Asian, Chinese, she guessed, and his dark hair was uncombed, pushed back from his creased forehead. "Excuse me," he said again. "How do you know my sister?"

Rose blinked at him. "Your sister?"

"Mia Chen. I heard you say her name. I heard you say that my sister is dead."

.

Andrew Chen sat with a fresh cup of steaming coffee clenched between his two hands. The Doctor was leaning back in his chair, arms crossed and head turned to one side; he was pretending to be interested in a display of local art on the wall next to their table – art that a lesser connoisseur would have called a stack of rusty license plates nailed to an old board.

Rose sighed. When Andrew had sat down with them, she had successfully _not_ rolled her eyes at the Doctor's huff. She never had understood why he felt the need to sneer at every other man she talked to. He was overprotective, but she liked to think that her dad would have been the same, if he hadn't…

She pushed those thoughts aside. "Andrew," she said. "We thought… I mean, the way Carmen talked about you, I thought you lived in Iowa."

"Mia said it was better that way, if no one knew I was here," he said. "Our parents died a year ago, and a few months after that, I came up to visit Mia, to see how she was." He shook his head. "She was messed up, working long hours, not eating or sleeping. She had applied to Gateway because she knew it would make our parents happy. They always said she'd do great things." Andrew tried to smile but failed miserably.

"I wanted her to come home with me, but she wouldn't leave Gateway. She'd just been assigned to Dr. Kuri-Hunt's team, researching magnetic fields, and she was so excited. She was stressed out and miserable, but excited, and no one in that place cares about you as long as you hand in your work on time." He looked at Rose, and she smiled reassuringly.

" _You_ work for Gateway," the Doctor said, not a question but an accusation.

Andrew stared at him. "How did you…"

"You've got one of their badge-things there, under your coat."

Andrew looked down. Sure enough, the corner of his Gateway ID card was poking out from under the edge of his coat. "Oh. Right." He tucked it back again. "They had an opening for an electrician, so I applied. I wanted to keep an eye on my sister, but she made me swear not to tell anyone that I was her brother. She didn't want anyone thinking that she'd got me the job, and it was Gateway. Nobody there has any family, not that they talk about. That would distract them from their work."

"And no one figured it out?" Rose said, surprised. "You've got the same last name."

He shrugged. "It's a pretty common name. Like Smith or Hernandez. Ever since the Great Firewall fell in China, there've been a lot of Chens applying to American universities. There's been five Dr. Chens at Gateway in the last three years."

"Did Mia tell you what Dr. Kuri has been working on?" the Doctor asked.

Andrew shook his head. "She said it was secret, but she didn't like it. I didn't see much of her the last few weeks, though. Her and Carmen were spending a lot more time together, and since Carmen didn't know who I was…"

"The two of them were pretty close," Rose said, trying to be subtle.

He gave her a strange look. "They were dating," he said. "Carmen practically lived at Mia's apartment until…" He hesitated.

Rose tried to appear encouraging, the Doctor only looked impatient. Andrew looked back and forth between the two of them as if wondering why he was trusting them with so much, but eventually he shrugged and went on.

"About a week ago, Mia showed up at my apartment. She was crying and a mess. I hadn't seen her like that since our parent's died. She said that Dr. Kuri had done something, she say what exactly, but it had something to do with a dog, some stray that Kuri had picked up. Mia loved animals. She's not usually squeamish about the dissections and all that, she knows its part of the process, but this one really shook her. She said that it went against nature."

"That's when she decided to confront Dr. Kuri," the Doctor said, nodding. It made sense. "He's trying to find a way to cross the time field interface. The stasis pods were part of the experiment, but I had it backwards. He wasn't trying to keep the time loop _inside_ the pod. He wanted to build something that would keep the time winds _out_. And he's moving up in the food chain. First trees, then a dog. Mia was probably just an accident, but she was a convenient first step into human testing."

The Doctor was frowning at his own thoughts, not paying attention to them, but Rose winced and glanced at Andrew.

"So it's true," he said. "You really think that she's dead. But she can't be. Where's her body? People don't just disappear, and even Dr. Kuri can't carry a body out of Gateway without _somebody_ saying something!"

"They didn't have to carry her out," the Doctor said angrily and in that voice he used when he was dumbing something down for the lesser alien species. "She fell into Dr. Kuri's energy field and was disbursed by the Time Vortex. She's here!" He snatched up a handful of napkins and threw them into the air. "And here!" He dipped his fingers in the tea and flicked he droplets at Andrew. "Your sister is here, there, everywhere," he said. "A billion, billion atoms scattered across time and space! She's gone."

More than a few eyes were on them now, and Rose could see the bartender watching them very carefully. She smiled nervously, trying to look as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on, and scooped up as many tea-soaked napkins as she could reach.

Andrew stared at the Doctor. His fist tightened. Rose recognized the look of someone about to take a swing, and she wouldn't have stopped him if he did, but didn't. He stood up and slammed his knuckles down against the table. "She is _not_ dead," he said, cold anger in his eyes, and then he turned and walked out of the bar.

Rose sighed and stood up to follow him.

"Let him go," the Doctor said.

"You know, you can be really thick sometimes," she snapped. He looked up in surprise. "He _works_ for Gateway," she explained slowly. "Which means that he can get us _back inside_. If you hadn't just run him off."

The Doctor opened his mouth, then closed it again. He stood up to follow her, but she stopped him with a hand on his chest. "Nope. You, pay the check." She jerked her head toward the cash register. "I'll catch him up. He definitely doesn't want to talk to you." Smiling to herself, she left the bar, and left the Doctor to sort out their bill.

.

Rose found Andrew not far down the road, standing in the doorway of a closed-up shop. He was crouched down against the cold, his hands in his pockets, and his shoulders shaking as he sobbed. She hesitated and put a hand on his shoulder.

"It's alright," she said, even though it wasn't. "He can be like that sometimes," she said, even though she knew that it was actually most of the time.

"I couldn't even tell anyone," he said, standing up and wiping his tears on the back of his sleeve. "When I heard what they said, that she'd quit and gone home… gone home to be with _me_! I knew it was a lie, but I had to keep working. I had to find out what really happened to her."

Rose saw the determined look in his eye. "You've been investigating, too," she said.

He nodded. "When Mia showed up at my apartment, she said she didn't want me working there anymore. She said it would be bad enough if they found out I was her brother, but she knew I'd been looking around, reading files I wasn't supposed to – I had access through the IS computer terminal. Mia said there were people who'd come from Gateway who could have you disappeared if they thought you were trouble."

"Dr. McNeal said they were more interested in GMO potatoes," Rose said.

"Yeah, well, that's what most people think. And they are. A lot of their work is good stuff, helping people, curing diseases, but that doesn't bring in the big bucks, does it? That's not what their donors are interested in, or their stockholders. From what I've read, Dr. McNeal used to be a good person. They say she got her start in Africa, in the nineties; she helped find the cure for Malaria, and she was part of the team that developed the new meds they used to treat Ebola. But that was before she came here. You don't get promoted to Head of Projects without knowing how to play to a room of billionaires, and no billionaire is going to write a check for a new kind of potato."

Rose nodded. That sounded like the world that she knew. "You said that Mia and Carmen were dating," she said.

He nodded. "Mia really loved that woman. I don't know why. Carmen seemed like just another intern, nicer than most. She never looked down her nose at me or the other staff, but she was so quiet. Mia was always hearing other people talk at her. I think she liked the quiet." He smiled sadly.

Rose didn't want to push him, but they were short on time. She touched his arm. "Carmen is still in there," she said. "She's trapped in Dr. Kuri's machine and the Doctor and I can't get her out without you."

"Mia really loved her," Andrew said. He looked away down the street, toward the imposing edifice of Gateway Institute. He nodded. "I was getting tired of that job, anyway," he said.

Soon after, the Doctor finally joined them. He was muttering something incoherent about a 400% tip, but fell silent when he saw them.

"I apologize," he said to Andrew, short but sincere. "Now, what do we have for a plan?"

The Doctor had a few more questions for Andrew before they started back toward Gateway. They had a plan, and a way back inside. Now, all they needed now was a little luck and for a whole lot of guards to be out on their coffee break.

* * *

 **Pop Quiz: Who can remember which famous Time Lady first taught us, "You can have two adjacent time continuums running at different rates, but without a field-interface stabilizer, you can't cross from one to the other?"**

 **-Paint**


	7. Chapter 7

**Nothing in the Doctor Whoniverse belongs to me, except a couple pencils and a coffee mug that I left in the UNIT employee breakroom. It's mine, and I want it back, sir! You can keep the pencils.**

* * *

"Okay, so that door leads to the east service stairwell," Andrew said, crouching down behind a hedge of boxwood and pointing through a gap between two branches. "The guards only walk it at the beginning and end of every shift, so we should have…" Andrew checked the time on his phone, "about fifteen minutes before the next crew takes over. That's _if_ they haven't doubled the shift since your last visit."

"I don't see a door handle," Rose said. "How do we get inside?"

"You get someone to let you in." He grinned at her. "There is no handle. That's why security doesn't bother with it."

The hedge overlooked a slate-gray apron and cement loading bay behind the Gateway Complex. The huge truck doors were closed tight and locked up for the night, and the only movement was a plastic bag rolling like a tumbleweed across the asphalt. A smaller, narrow door stood at the nearest corner, dwarfed by the loading doors. The single light above it was burned out, but Rose could make out cigarette cartons and butts scattered like fallen leaves on the ground. The door was probably a high traffic area during regular business hours, but for now, it appeared to be deserted.

"What about the cameras?" the Doctor asked. At the top of a tall post behind them was a tower of black cameras, their glowing red lights like a dozen eyes watching every angle of the loading bay.

"There's no deliveries tonight," Andrew said. "Probably. So, no one'll be watching the cameras out here… hopefully. Look, you wanted a way in. This is the weakest point in Gateway's security, unless you want to spend a few weeks casing the joint, maybe hire a professional team to take out the cameras… and the alarms… and the auto-lockdown function on the doors and elevators. It's up to you." He looked the Doctor in the eye – not an easy thing to do with a nine-hundred year old Time Lord - and shrugged.

The Doctor looked away first. They didn't have time to think of a better plan.

Rose nodded to Andrew. "We'll do it. But hurry. You said we've only got fifteen minutes to shift change."

"Less now," Andrew said. He smiled and winked at her. "Back in a few." And then he was running along the hedge in an awkward, doubled-over crouch to avoid the eyes of the cameras until he reached the front again.

The Doctor waited until the man was out of sight before he muttered, "I saw that."

"Saw what?" Rose asked, innocently.

He scoffed. "He's cute, that one."

"I didn't notice." She smiled, pretending to adjust the laces on her shoe.

"I saw that, too!"

"Saw what?"

The Doctor fumed, Rose grinned, and the second ticked slowly by.

"Great innovators, the Chinese," the Doctor said absently after awhile. "The Great Firewall… that would have been in 2031." He laughed. "Did I ever tell you about the time the Tardis landed inside the royal bathhouse inside the Forbidden City? It was in 1502, if I remember right, and the emperor had just…"

"Doctor?" Rose interrupted. He looked at her, she covered his mouth with her hand. "Hush!" He smiled, and she smiled, and they both turned their eyes back to watch the loading bay. Half a minute later, the service door opened and Andrew beckoned them inside.

"There he is! Let's go."

They walked as casually as they could across the gravel lot, over the cigarette butts, and through the door. There was no outcry, no sudden sirens blaring. Rose considered it a rousing success.

"We've only got a few minutes," Andrew said once the door was closed behind them. "I saw a few of the guys in the reception area. They're all watching the game. The US team made it to the semifinals World Series in Egypt this year, which is lucky for us. Even on alert, the guards will be preoccupied with the game, and they won't patrol on the basement level. We have to hurry." He started down the stairs.

"Yes," the Doctor agreed. "Rose, you and Andrew will head downstairs. Keep an eye on Carmen. Keep an eye on that lab, and if Dr. Kuri is around, whatever you do, don't let that man touch a single button on that damned machine. Any fluctuation in the energy field could blow us all out of existence…"

"What are you talking about?" Andrew said, staring at him. "Dr. Kuri's equipment may not pass an official inspection, but it's not going to blow up."

"Oh, you've checked, have you?" the Doctor jeered. "Had a bit of a poke around all the nooks and crannies?"

"I have, actually," he said, crossing his arms. The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "Two weeks ago, before Mia went missing, I had a look 'round the place. I was worried about her and we were running a load bank test on the primary support systems so the machines were all turned down for the night," he explained to Rose. "None of the scientists can run their equipment during a test, so the lab was deserted. Dr. Kuri's power converter is a bit more spit-and-chewing gum that I'd recommend in an industrial setting, but it's not dangerous."

"Ha!" the Doctor said, throwing up his hands. "What do you know?"

"You think I'd let my sister work on that thing if it was?"

Andrew's anger and grief added weight to his words. Rose winced, and even the Doctor had the decency to look embarrassed by what he'd said. "I'm sorry. I didn't think… but you're only an electrician. You can't possibly understand the advanced technology that went into-"

" _Only_ the electrician?" Andrew said, shaking his head. "I'll admit I only had to dumb down my qualifications a bit for the HR rep, but you don't think that an electrician at Gateway Institute goes around resetting tripped circuit breakers and changing out light bulbs? I've got to troubleshoot just about every piece of equipment in this building. I've debugged mass spectrometers, DNA synthesizers, Nano wave frequency radiators… Mia wasn't the only prodigy in our family."

"Yes, alright," the Doctor said, "I get the picture. But you need to understand that, whatever it looks like, whatever that machine used to be, it is dangerous _now_. And Carmen is being held in the energy field, remember. The barrier that is keeping her alive is adding an extra strain on the system. Any change in the power levels could overload the generator and cremate the woman inside. So, you two get down there and keep an eye out. I've got one or two things to pick up."

"You're joking, right. The basement level will be deserted, but there are a dozen guards upstairs. If they see you…"

"I'll just have to make sure that they don't." The Doctor nodded to Rose and then started jogging up the stairs. At first, they could hear his footsteps echoing, and then a door opened far above their heads, opened and closed, and then they heard nothing.

Andrew looked at Rose. "If they catch him…"

"They won't," she said with more confidence than she felt, but it was enough to convince him. He sighed and started down the stairs ahead of her; Rose guessed that he was beginning to wonder what he had gotten himself into. She wondered whether he would ask or decide that he'd rather not know.

.

The Doctor ran up the stairs to the second floor, looked through the narrow window to make sure the coast was clear, and then dashed out into the dark hallway, running as fast as he could. He reached the far end, opened the broom closet door, and then... closed it again. He looked around the hall. "No tree," he muttered. "There's no tree here."

He sighed and spun around again, jogging back down the hall a few yards before he skidded to a halt. A yellow flashlight beam was playing over the walls at the far end. He heard footsteps and then voices approaching.

"C'mon, Frank, it's just storerooms down there. Nothing but test tubes and microscope slides."

"Boss-lady says to check everywhere, so we go everywhere."

The Doctor scowled. "Can't ignore the boss-lady just this bloody once," he muttered. He picked a door and aimed the sonic screwdriver at the lock. He ducked through it and out of sight just before the guards turned the corner. The room was full of metal shelves and filing cabinets. The Doctor leaned against the door, listening as two pairs of heavy boots marched closer and every doorknob was jiggled along the way.

"You really think some corporate spy made it past the security checks out front?" the first voice said.

Another door, another knob jiggling. The Doctor looked down at the handle of the door he hid behind and realized that it hadn't locked behind him. He fumbled through his pocket for the sonic screwdriver.

"Nah, it's just another drill. Who'd be stupid enough to break into this place?"

The Doctor heard the boots stop in front of his door. If he used the sonic now, they might hear it; if they found the door unlocked, they would certainly be suspicious and investigate. He waited, the seconds ticking by.

"You're right," the second voice said finally. "This is a waste of time. I hear the first floor, south corner coffee bar always has a few muffins left over at the end of the day."

"Blueberry?"

"There's only one way to find out."

"I've got a pocket viewer, we can catch the third inning before it's time to check the east end doors..."

The Doctor sighed as the voices retreated back down the hall. He waited an extra minute to make sure the men were gone before he slipped out the door. It didn't sound like the guards patrol had made it down the Tardis's hall. they would certainly have spotted the bloody great tree trunk sticking out of the wall if they had.

.

Rose opened the basement door slowly and looked out. Andrew had assured her that there would be no guards, but she wasn't so sure. Dr. McNeil had seemed very angry with them, and she knew that the lab was vulnerable now. Rose didn't think that the woman was the sort to make the same mistake twice.

"The coast is clear," she said, stepping out into the hall. If anything, this part of the basement was even dirtier than the dusty corridor leading to Dr. Kuri's lab. Her shoes left scuff marks half an inch deep in dust bunnies and there were no other footprints besides their own.

Andrew looked around then pointed left. "That way," he said, "I think." They started walking, slowly, and the thick dust muffled their footsteps as they went along. "So, your doctor used to work here or something?" he said after they had passed the first intersection without any trouble.

"Why would you think that?" Rose said, looking at him sideways.

"He said he's got some equipment upstairs. Gateway has an ownership agreement with all their employees. You build it at Gateway, it belongs to them. There's been lawsuits, of course, but no one's ever won. How else would he know what's up there? I doubt that even Dr. McNeil knows what all is stored up there."

Bet she knows there's trees in time-loop stasis, Rose thought bitterly, but she said, "He never worked here. We just arrived. Our ship is parked upstairs." They reached a corner, and Rose looked carefully around it. Still no guards.

"Ship? There's not even a lake for ten miles…"

"Um, yeah." Rose sighed. "It's a spaceship. This way?" She took a left down the hall. The Doctor was right, Andrew was cute, but she just wasn't in the mood to explain everything all over again. It was just too much work for too much risk, especially after the disaster that was Adam Mitchell.

.

The Doctor stood in the Tardis equipment store room surrounded by crates and boxes. He opened one, looked over the contents and then tossed it aside. He stared at the cluttered around him, wires and gadgets everywhere. He'd been meaning to clean up this room for a few decades now but had never found the time. Why hadn't he made time!?

He pulled out another, much larger crate and upended it onto the floor. A Movellan laser gun fell out, and a stray blaster charge burst past his ankle ricocheted off the wall and burnt a hole in the ceiling.

"I'll fix that," he muttered. "I swear, I'll fix that... someday." He reached for another crate and kept searching.

.

Rose and Andrew stood around the corner from Dr. Kuri's lab. The guard on the lab door, however, had not moved an inch since they had arrived and seen him standing there. There was no sign of activity inside the lab; the light from the energy field shone through the gap in the doors and now and then, Rose heard a noise, like a giant bug zapper burning its prey, but there were no voices and no sign of anyone going in or out.

"Maybe Dr. Kuri's gone home for the night," she said.

Andrew frowned. "Mia used to say that he practically sleeps in his office. If your doc's right, and he's using Carmen for a human guinea pig, he's not going far. He'll want to make the most of her while he's got her."

Rose nodded. "Even if he's not in the lab, we can't do anything while that guard's standing there. Could you set off an alarm or something, get him to leave?"

"Any noise is more likely to bring more guards down here than get that one upstairs. They're waiting for you, remember. But maybe you could, you know, _distract_ him?"

"Doing what, exactly? No, don't answer that. Even if I did distract him, so what? You get to slip into the lab and I get arrested. That doesn't exactly help our plan, does it?"

"You could stun him," he suggested.

"With what? My stunning good looks?"

"You've got a spaceship," he said, with more accusation to his tone than belief, "and you're telling me you don't have some sort of laser gun or stun beam that could knock the guy out? What kind of aliens are you?"

"The Doctor's an alien. I'm not," Rose said. "Why does everyone always think I'm an alien! And no, I don't have a stun gun. I wish I did. I wish the Doctor were here. He'd know what to do. What's taking him so long?" She bit her lip anxiously and looked over Andrew's shoulder at the guard.

.

The Doctor carefully locked the closet door and then jogged back down the hall, the fist-sized field-interface stabilizer heavy in his hand. It wasn't the Tardis's own device, but a smaller version that he had been tinkering with over the years. The Tardis stabilizer was large enough to generate its own small gravity field; it had to be to transport something as large as the Tardis – or as large as the Tardis _would_ be if it existed in real space.

He jogged past the elevator toward the service stairs. The two guards he had nearly met before were not the only ones, and it was just possible that some other patrol would decide that the second floor were more interesting than blueberry muffins and baseball. His hand was on the doorknob when he felt the tingle at the back of his neck and hesitated. The hall was silent, no sound of voices or footsteps. He hadn't heard the chime of the elevator or the whoosh of its doors opening, but when he turned around, he saw a woman walking away as if she had just stepped out of the lift. She didn't see him; she was too busy juggling an armload of files and rolled up paper. Her auburn hair and ghostly white blouse were familiar to the Doctor, but it wasn't until she turned down the hall that led to the Tardis's closet that he caught a glimpse of her face and recognized her as the woman in the energy field.

The Doctor knew better than to shout. He knew better than to believe that this was the real Carmen Ortiz, too. The shimmer around the edges of her clothes was a dead giveaway. He knew an echo in time when he saw one.

There were precious few minutes before the next security patrol, but the Doctor jogged back down the hall, following the ghost. He reached the corner in time to see it lift its hand and pass a translucent card over the lock of one of the many doors. The lock, of course, couldn't read a card that was not there, but Carmen's echo pulled the door handle anyway and stepped through the door.

The Doctor turned and ran for the stairwell. He didn't have to wait until the echo re-emerged from the locked room. He didn't need to see what happened next. The barrier between the time field and the real world was disintegrating faster than he had anticipated, space was disintegrating along the edges and allowing things to slip through. Time was literally running out.

.

Rose checked the time on her phone and shook her head. "It's been fifteen minutes already, what's keeping him!" She looked back around the corner at the guard. The man hadn't moved more than to scratch his nose. "I suppose it's too much to hope he'll have to pee soon," she muttered.

Andrew crouched down in front of her, also looking at the guard. "You could tie up your shirt, show a little skin, walk past him and then… bam! I hit him on the back of the head."

"With what?" Rose asked, tiredly. This was the fourth variation of the same plan that she'd heard from him.

Andrew looked around, but there were no convenient heavy pipes or forgotten maintenance tools at hand. He pulled off his shoe and held it up. Rose stared at him, and he sighed. "Yeah, probably not." He put his shoe back on. "Well, what're we gonna do? You're doctor's not here and we can't get into the lab."

"Would this help?"

Rose looked down at something boxy and white that looked more like a cardboard model of what someone _thought_ looked like alien weaponry than an actual weapon. Andrew was standing in front of her, but the arm that offered her the gun came from behind and was wrapped in a very familiar leather sleeve.

"Doctor!" She turned and threw her arms around him.

"Hush! We've got company, I take it. How many."

"One guard on the door. No sign of Dr. Kuri or Dr. McNeil yet, and the lab has been quiet. Well, mostly quiet. What took you so long?"

The Doctor scoffed and laughed and looked away.

"You found it, didn't you? Don't tell me you couldn't find the stabilizer!"

"I found it," he said, pushing in front of Andrew to get a look around the corner. "…was in my spare coat pocket…" he muttered under his breath. Rose heard, and smiled with relief, but she said nothing.

"Is that a laser gun?" Andrew said, reaching for the weapon in the Doctor's hand.

"No, it is a _stun_ gun," the Doctor said, slapping his hand away, "not for playing with." He cradled the weapon in one hand and ran his fingers over it. The look in his eyes was haunted and gleaming. "It has a kill setting, of course…"

Rose winced as she remembered how easily he had raised that massive arm cannon in van Staten's underground complex, how readily he aimed it at the Dalek. Sure, the creature had killed more than a dozen men and women and had very nearly killed Rose, too, but the Doctor was no killer. He had been anxious and upset; van Statten's people had tortured him and the Daleks had killed all his people. He'd had every reason to be angry. Hadn't he? And it wasn't as if he had _actually_ killed the Dalek.

Still, she didn't like the way he was looking at that gun. She put out her hand slowly, reaching for the weapon, but he shot her a look that was cold and hard and gone in an instant. "Not a toy," he said, "not for playing with." He turned a dial on base of the handle and, before Rose could stop him, stepped around the corner and fired.

.

Marcel wasn't the brightest bulb in the pack, but even a place as prestigious as Gateway needed a few people who believed that the almighty paycheck came before the pursuit of knowledge. People like that only asked one question, and it wasn't as if Marcel believed the whispers that the old hospital was haunted. The basement job was double-pay, and all he had to do was not look behind him.

That was the easy part. He didn't want to look behind. The room sounded less like a laboratory, with its quiet hum of equipment and clicking of keyboards, and more like a distant forest fire, crackling and burning and creeping closer. As long as Marcel didn't look down, he couldn't see the red lights flickering through the gap under the door, and he had no reason to imagine that they were tongues of fire licking at the heels of his boots…

He stood, staring straight ahead, focused on the long, empty corridor, and on either side, more long, empty corridors. It was a simple job, and after a couple more hours he could take his padded paycheck home where he had a videoscreen set to records the night's game and a fancy frozen pizza, one of the good ones that cost twice as much as delivery. As long as none of the guys spoiled the game ending for him. He'd have to leave by the back door to avoid the watercooler chatter…

"Oi, you there!"

Marcel stood up straight and almost saluted; it was the kind of voice that did that to you, a voice that could raise an army. Marcel caught himself quick enough and turned toward the man striding toward him down the hall. He wore leather and denim – not an employee, then – and he was holding a strange, boxy device like a supermarket barcode reader. Marcel raised his standard issue neural-taser, but he wasn't fast enough.

.

Before Rose could make a sound, the Doctor stepped around the corner, aimed his weapon and fired. There was a soft thud as the guard hit the floor. The Doctor shuddered, and Rose snatched the stun gun from his hand. She gave him a look that said they would talk about this later and ran to the guard's prone body. She checked his neck for a pulse and his head for injuries; yes to the first, no to the second. Actually, the man seemed to be snoring peacefully. A little drop of spittle was gathering at the corner of his mouth. Rose looked up at the Doctor, about to be angry, when a much louder snort escaped the guard's lips.

"He's asleep?" she said, accusingly.

"I might have made a few adjustments to the stun mechanism," the Doctor said. "At least he won't have a splitting headache when he wakes up in a few hours." He held open the lab doors. "Bring sleeping beauty."

Rose frowned at him. Van Statten's people had tortured and experimented on the Doctor; it was only natural for him to feel a bit touchy when it came to underground bunkers and lab rats. She took the guard by the arms and Andrew carried the man's legs. The Doctor held the door for them while they dragged him inside and set him up in the corner out of the away.

Andrew stood up, wiping the dust off his hands, and then he turned around and caught sight of the pulsing energy field and the woman suspended inside. "Good god…" he whispered. "It wasn't like this when I…" He shook his head. "Mia really went into that thing?"

Rose stood up, trying not to look at poor Carmen. She had seen enough the last time she was here. She touched Andrew's hand. "I'm sorry," she said. What else could she say?

The Doctor glanced at them both then headed up the low stairs to the computer controls. He had the stabilizer in one hand and took the sonic screwdriver out of his pocket with the other. He lay on his back under the main interface and opened up the access panel. Rose left Andrew's side and went to stand at the bottom of the stairs where she could look up and watch the Doctor work.

"Can you do it?" she asked.

"If I had an hour and a sack of equipment that won't be invented for another hundred and fifty years," he said, touching a wire and pulling his hand back as sparks few. "I should have brought the welding spanner. Your boy there is right, and this thing was put together with duct tape and a prayer. Keep an eye on Carmen, will you. What color's the time field? Is it blue? Blue would be bad right now. Very bad."

Reluctantly, Rose looked up at the energy field. It wasn't blue. It was still the same yellow, red and orange fire that it had been before. Carmen was still hanging, frozen in the center, falling backwards… but no. Rose stared at her and tried to remember. Carmen wasn't the same. Her back was still arched as if she were falling, but her arms were no longer thrown out in front of her. Now, her right arm seemed to reach sideways, stretching out toward the edge of the energy field. Even her face, now that Rose knew to look more carefully, seemed to have turned half an inch to the right. And yet, Rose could not shake the feeling that the woman's eyes were on her.

"Doctor, she's moved."

"Not possible," he said, his voice muffled by the electrical wiring. "It's just a trick of the light."

"Um, no… No it isn't, Doctor. She's definitely moved. Look!"

He swore under his breath and raised his head above the computer banks. He looked at Carmen, and then looked again. His eyes narrowed as he saw the thick leather watchband around her outstretched wrist. It all made perfect sense, if you believed in one hell of a coincidence. Or if you could believe that Carmen was more than just some intern at a research facility, that she might actually be a–

"Look, she's trying to get out," Andrew said, interrupting the Doctor's thoughts. " _Can_ she get out? I mean, can she get herself out?"

"Yes, maybe." The Doctor shook his head. He didn't have time to explain. He ducked down into the computer again and began pulling out wires with a fervor. "If we had a year or two, if she could hold out long enough, she might be able to claw her way out of there, but these circuits won't hold for more than an hour at the rate they're burning power."

"An hour?" Rose said. "That's enough time, isn't it?"

"Yes," the Doctor said. "Maybe." He didn't add that once he plugged the field-interface stabilizer into Gateway's power grid, the circuits would burn out in minutes. He would only get one chance at this.


	8. Chapter 8

**Nothing in the Doctor Whoniverse belongs to me. Apparently, my coffee mug was left too long and has grown some sort of sentient, alien fungus. UNIT refuses to return it to me. A recovery mission is planned, but I'm not at liberty to discuss the details. No word yet on the whereabouts of my missing pencils.**

* * *

He always made it look so easy. Adapting alien tech to alien tech, forcing one device to adapt to a power source completely antithetical to its original design; a trained engineer would call it impossible, throw up his hands and move to Tahiti, but the Doctor made it look easy. That was part of the myth he had created for himself, and sometimes he even believed it. You disappeared under a consul for a few seconds, spouted a stream of technical terms, wink, smile and voila! Save the world. It looked easy, but it wasn't.

"Those two wires, hold them together… carefully!" he ordered.

Andrew did as he was told. He held the wires between a set of mini-pliers pulled from his pocket while the Doctor aimed the sonic screwdriver and fused them together. He wished he had thought to grab the molecular spanner, or at least one of the fusion pliers that he kept in the Tardis workroom, but he hadn't thought of it at the time. He hadn't known what he would see once he opened up Dr. Kuri's kit-bashed generator. Spit and chewing gum, Andrew had said, but it was worse than that, and once the Doctor was through with it, the whole thing would be held together with little more than a stern look and crossed fingers.

"Right." The Doctor pushed aside a loose circuit board. "I need a two-pronged inlet, direct to the power line." He looked, but the machine wasn't built for what he wanted to make it do. "The field-interface stabilizer needs to draw its power straight from the grid or else it'll burn out everything in between."

Andrew pointed past a mess of wires. "Something like that?" he said.

The Doctor scoffed. "That's a grounding cord, not an inlet."

"No, the yellow banding means it's a secondary power conduit," Andrew said, ignoring the Doctor's dismissive tone. He aimed a small flashlight into the darkness of the lower corner. "See, it connects there and there to the main generator, but it's a back-up system. As long as the primary power source holds, that should give you enough energy for your stabilizer without draining the generator itself… at least for a few minutes. The generator is pulling more juice that it should. It'll short out eventually."

"The field generator wasn't designed to work around a human body," the Doctor said, meaning Carmen. "Her electrical field is interfering with the buffers. It'll keep pulling more and more power, exponentially, as long as she's inside." He frowned at the yellow wire. "How exactly do you suggest that we hook this up to a straight wire?"

The field-interface stabilizer was a small box about the size of a Rubik's Cube, and just as colorful. At the back, two metal prongs protruded and were designed to be plugged into an outlet. There was no third grounding prong. The Doctor hadn't expected to need one.

Andrew pulled out his pocket knife and snapped open the blade. "This is double copper bundling," he said. "I can strip the wire, get you two lines that will splice directly to the pongs on your stabilizer there. It's risky, and you won't want to touch the metal directly, but it should work. Of course, with the secondary system bypassed, if generator does blow a fuse, there'll be nothing to stop this whole thing blowing up in our face. Literally."

The Doctor glanced down the steps toward Rose who was watching the energy field intently. Or, no, she was looking at Carmen, at the woman they were trying to save. The energy field had expanded by a full foot around. The mini-sun was still mainly yellow and orange, but there were sparks of green showing between the spinning arms of the lower generator. He looked up at Carmen's frightened face, her twisted body and her rust-red braid brushing her throat.

"Doctor?" Andrew was watching him, the knife in his hand ready to cut the yellow wire. "We could look for another—"

"Do it," he said. "But be careful. All those wires around it are live."

"Believe me, I know." Andrew stripped the wire, cut the copper and expertly twisted it around the prongs of the field-interface stabilizer. He glanced at the Doctor while he worked. "How long, exactly, are you expecting this to last, Doc?"

"Don't call me 'Doc'. Once the stabilizer is plugged in and switched on… we'll be lucky to get five minutes."

"Only five?"

The Doctor nodded. "But we'll have less time than that to get her out," he said. "I'm gonna have to reach inside to pull her out. Once the barrier is broken, there'll be a power surge to compensate…"

"And that'll blow the fuse," Andrew finished.

"The field-interface stabilizer will generate a protective field between this time continuum and the one inside the field. Without it, my arm would age, wither and die seconds after breaking the barrier, but Kuri's generator was never meant to handle so much power at once. The surge will blow every circuit in the system."

"There you go," Andrew said. "The stabilizer is in place." He rose up on his knees and looked over the computer banks. "What will happen to Carmen if the system blows while she's still in there?"

The Doctor shook his head. "I don't know. Whatever is protecting her inside, I doubt it has the power to take that kind of pressure. Best case scenario, the time winds will blast her to dust in an instant and she won't feel a thing."

"And the worst case?"

His face was grim. "The time continuum inside that field could be running at a thousand years for every second of our time. If she turns to dust in an instant of our time…"

Andrew stared at him. "Is that what happened to Mia?"

He shook his head. "No. She died the moment she crossed the barrier. She never reached the inner field. Her timeline wouldn't have stretched out that way."

"What did she feel?"

The Doctor winced. He didn't do this part. He arrived in a whirlwind, saved as many as he could and left just as quickly. He didn't have to face the families and friends of the ones he couldn't save. Rose was better at it.

"I don't know what she felt, Andrew," he said honestly. "Maybe… hot? Surprised as she fell, and then hot, but it would have been fast."

"Too fast for her to know what was happening to her?"

The Doctor nodded. "Yes. Very fast."

Andrew sighed and bowed his head. The Doctor patted his shoulder once, awkwardly, and then stood up, giving the man a moment for his grief. He looked down the stairs at Rose.

"How's she doing?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Same as before, I guess. The field is green at the bottom, but I haven't seen anything blue."

"Good," he said. "That's good."

"I feel like she's looking at me…"

The Doctor frowned and looked up at Carmen's face. Her eyes glittered, reflecting the firelight of the energy field. Like a painting, she seemed to be looking at him, too.

Andrew stood up suddenly, startling them both. "We'll only get one chance at this," he said. "A few seconds before the whole system fails."

"Yes, probably," the Doctor agreed.

"I want to do it."

"What?"

"I'll pull her out," Andrew said. "It's my fault she's in there. It's my fault that Mia confronted Kuri. I knew she was worried. I knew there had been trouble, but I didn't try to stop her. I should have…"

The Doctor shook his head. "You couldn't have stopped this," he said. "Some things, they're meant to be. You can't change the past."

"I can save Carmen," he insisted. "You should be up here, keeping an eye on your stabilizer. I don't know the tech. If something goes wrong, I won't know what to do."

That was true, but the Doctor didn't want to admit it. There may be adjustments that only he could do on the device, and as long as the field-interface stabilizer did its job, there was no more danger to a human than to him reaching into the time-energy field. The Doctor would rather have taken all the risk on himself, but Andrew was determined, his jaw set as steel.

The Doctor nodded. "Alright," he said. "Her right hand is closest to the edge of the field, but you should go for her left elbow, there. There's a break in the railing. You can pull her through, but hang on. If you slip or fall into the field, you're dead."

Andrew nodded and hurried down the stairs, taking his place close to the railing. The Doctor stared into the energy field at the swirling time winds. He frowned at the Carmen's outstretched arm. Rose was wrong. The woman wasn't scraping to get out; she was reaching, reaching for something. But what? She was the only thing inside the energy bubble. Unless she was reaching for something outside…?

The field-interface stabilizer beeped softly. It was charged and ready.

"Doctor?" Rose said, watching his expression curiously.

He nodded to her, and she backed away toward the lab doors, toward the place where Carmen was reaching, the Doctor noticed. He nodded to Andrew and placed his finger on the black switch of the stabilizer. He was eye to eye with Carmen's frozen face, and it bothered him that he didn't know what she was reaching for. It egged at him, her outstretched hand, reaching for the unknown. If all went well, he could ask her himself in a few minutes.

He looked at Andrew. "Right. Ready? Three… Two…"

There was a sound in the hall, and one of the lab doors sprang open and bumped gently against the legs of the guard still sleeping off his stun-gun blast in the corner. Everyone froze. The only movement was the churning electrical fire inside the energy field. The Doctor stood with his finger on the black button; Andrew had his feet planted and his arms ready to reach into the fire to pull Carmen out. Rose stared at the doorway where Dr. Kuri stood with his hand still on the doorknob, and Dr. McNeil stood behind him, one foot angled forward as she stepped, one hand raised to push back a stray strand of gray hair.

For a moment, no one moved, and then Rose – who stood closest to the lab doors – took a step back in surprise. Her movement seemed to wake everyone else. Andrew stood up straight, reaching for Rose to pull her back, but Dr. McNeil had the gun in her pocket. She pulled it out and aimed at Andrew, her finger on the trigger.

"Don't move, any of you," she said. She looked down at the sleeping guard and then at Rose who still held the Doctor's boxy stun gun I her hand. "Put the weapon down," McNeil ordered.

Rose looked back over her shoulder at the Doctor who nodded. She did as the woman said, kicking the weapon away, too, because she knew that would come next.

Dr. Kuri dove for the stun gun and picked it up in shaking hands. "You see! I told you, Chelsey, they are spies. Chinese spies! You should not have let them go."

"What are you talking about, Markus?"

He pointed at Andrew. "Look! The Chinese! They have been wanting to steal my work for years. Why do you think I take such precautions as these? Now this man is sabotaging my generator!"

Dr. McNeil sighed and rubbed her forehead. "That's Andrew Chen. He works for us. He's the electrician, Markus. A Gateway employee."

"He works here?" Dr. Kuri shouted. "I am surrounded by spies!"

Dr. McNeil ignored him. "Andrew, I am disappointed," she said, and sounded like it. "I hired you. Your salary is more than reasonable. Why would you do this to me? Why would you betray Gateway like this?"

He gave her an icy look. "Mia was my sister," he said, coldly.

For a moment, Dr. McNeil stared at him blankly, and then her stern countenance faltered. She glanced at Dr. Kuri, but the man seemed indifferent to the news. He was examining the stun gun, turning it this way and that in a manner that made Rose nervous.

"I am sorry, Andrew," McNeil said with surprising sincerity. "I am so sorry for your loss. If I'd known…"

"What? You would have had me thrown into that fireball, too!?" He shook his head. "The Doctor's told me all about what you're doing down here. The generator and the time field

"You would have thrown me into that fireball, too?" He shook his head. "I know what you've been doing down here, McNeil. The Doctor's explained it all. The souped-up generator and the time field… You're not looking for a new energy source. How many people have died keeping your pet project a secret?"

"They were accidents. Both of them!" McNeil said, but she seemed less certain of herself than she had the last time they stood here. "Mia's fall was an accident. What else could it be? And Carmen isn't dead. Look at her! She's not even suffering."

"Not suffering?" Rose echoed. "She's screaming!"

"There is no scream," Dr. Kuri said. He had finally made up his mind how to hold the weapon and aimed the stun gun at her. It would have been more menacing if he hadn't been holding it upside down.

"You want to hear it?" the Doctor said. "I don't think you do." He was talking to Kuri, but his eyes were on Dr. McNeil and her gun. He stepped back to a different part of the computer system, keeping half an eye on her, but she didn't seem inclined to use it. She was watching Dr. Kuri with growing suspicion.

The Doctor adjusted a few dials, flipped a few switches. He kept a careful eye on the readouts to make sure that there was no power drop or surge in the generator. He found the right frequency and turned the dial, picking out one radio wave from the noise and turning up the volume until what had been a silent hum on the edge of hearing grew in depth and resonance until it echoed through the room in a heart-wrenching scream. It was almost the sound that he had heard in the Tardis, but this cry hadn't travelled across the centuries but came from the woman beside them.

Rose and Andrew both covered their ears, even Dr. Kuri flinched. He glared at the Doctor, but Dr. McNeil was staring at Carmen in horror. "It cannot…" She shook her head. "That's not her."

"It is." The Doctor turned the noise down again, but the scream still echoed in his ears. "You cannot tell me that that is not the sound of a woman suffering."

"And yet," Dr. Kuri said, "you cannot prove that her suffering is in any way my fault. I have told you already that this woman broke into my lab and fell herself into the field. I cannot be blamed for the ineptitude of others. You cannot prove that I pushed her."

"Can't I?" The Doctor turned another dial. There was no guarantee that what he was doing wouldn't stretch an already stretched circuitry past the breaking point, but McNeil had the gun and he needed her on his side. He had seen the echo of Carmen in the second floor hallway and he was pretty sure that he could induce another echo here. "Hold that door open another moment, Dr. Kuri, please," he said.

With a scowl, Dr. Kuri stepped forward and let the lab door slide closed behind him. He smiled triumphantly at the Doctor, but open or closed, it didn't really matter.

"Wait a moment." He adjusted a few more power levels. The echoes were caused by a tiny flare in the time field. If he could induce another flare at the right frequency, with Carmen so close, he just might be able to…

The energy field flared and the lights flickered. The Doctor felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, and he looked toward the lab doors. Rose and Dr. McNeil looked, too, but nothing happened.

Dr. Kuri smirked. "Well, doctor? I do not see how—"

Mia Chen materialized through the lab doors, and the Doctor felt both his hearts drop.

"Oh, God, Mia!" Andrew cried.

He hadn't meant that to happen. It was Carmen's echo that he had seen upstairs, and Carmen's echo that he had expected to induce down here. He would never willingly have brought back the ghost of Mia for her brother to see.

"She's not real, Andrew," the Doctor said, twisting dials. He hadn't meant to bring back Mia, but now that she was here, he couldn't let her fade until McNeil was convinced. "She's an echo, a memory pulled from the time energy inside the Vortex."

"Mia?" Andrew whispered and reached out his hand, but he couldn't bring himself to touch the shimmering image of his sister. She walked past him, with a glance up at the energy field, and approached the stairs leading to the bank of computers.

Dr. Kuri flinched back. He looked as if he had seen a _real_ ghost. McNeil frowned at him and looked up at the Doctor.

"What is this? A recording? Why should I believe what I see?"

"It is a recording," the Doctor said, "of a sort." He crossed his fingers and let the scene play out. He was fairly certain that Dr. Kuri had pushed Carmen into the time field, but he was less sure what had happened to Mia Chen. She may well have tripped or fallen. "I believe that Mia Chen fell into the time-energy field that Dr. Kuri's generator created. But the machine is unstable, and the wall between the Time Vortex that my people created and the physical world of this timeline is thinning. When Mia died, it created an memory, an echo, and the instability of the machine is allowing that echo to break through."

He glanced at Andrew apologetically. "I saw Carmen's echo upstairs when I went to get the stabilizer. I realized what was happening and thought that I could pull Carmen's echo out here again so that we could see what happened to her, how she fell… I'm sorry, Andrew. I didn't mean to bring Mia back. These are her last moments, three nights ago… the night she died."

Andrew stared at the echo of his sister with tears in his eyes. She stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up at the bank of computers and moving her lips as if speaking to someone. Her body wavered with every flash of the time field. She was gesturing, angrily, and pointing at the energy field.

"Can you… can we hear what she's saying?" Andrew asked. "If you want to prove it was Dr. Kuri…"

"It was not me," the man himself insisted, but his face was a mask of guilt. He cowered near the railing as close to the lab doors as he could get, and if they had been open, no doubt he would have fled the damning specter, but he had himself closed the doors, and now Dr. McNeil stood with her gun between him and escape. She didn't look ready to believe anything that he said.

"If you are trying to convince me, Doctor," McNeil said, "then I need more evidence. Show me that it was Dr. Kuri in this room with Mia, then I will have no more doubts."

The Doctor glanced at Andrew, and then nodded to Dr. McNeil. He adjusted the computer controls again, turning dials by millimeter and watching the readings so intently that he didn't look up until Dr. Kuri's cry drew his attention.

A second echo, this one of Dr. Kuri, appeared on the stairs only inches from the Doctor himself. Mia's echo was still arguing, but she was also backing away as Kuri's echo bore down on her, shouting and pointing at the energy field, at the computer banks and up to heaven itself. His echo appeared as paranoid and insane as the real man himself.

"That is not me! It is a lie!" Dr. Kuri shouted. "This is cheap entertainment. It shows what you want it to show, not the truth!"

"It is the truth, Dr. Kuri," the Doctor said. "You thought no one was watching, but someone is _always_ watching. Time bears witness to our actions. It remembers what we do."

The echo of Kuri caught the echo of Mia Chen by the wrist and swung her around. He pushed her back toward the energy field. She fought him, he pushed…

And then Dr. Kuri – the real Dr. Kuri – rushed forward. The echoes fractured and disbursed as he ran through them, heading for the computer banks. Maybe he was trying to disrupt the echoes before they damned him completely. Maybe he only wanted to get his hands around the Doctor's neck and strangle the man who had destroyed his career. Andrew jumped between the controls and the raging scientist; Kuri threw his considerable weight against the smaller man and in the struggle lost his grip on the stun gun. The weapon hit the floors, skidded to one side and was sucked into the energy field.

The power surged. The Doctor worked fast to adjust the dials to account for the surge and prevent a full-blown meltdown of the circuits. Andrew grappled with Dr. Kuri, eventually forcing him back from the computers, but the man was strengthened by his anger and broke free, kicking Andrew aside.

"Markus, stop!" Dr. McNeil aimed the gun at her colleague.

Kuri stared at her. "You would turn against me, Chelsey?" he said.

"It's over, Dr. Kuri," she said. "Give up now. I have many friends. You will be taken care of."

"But never to work again," he said with a bitter laugh. "I know how it works, Chelsey. I know I will not do anything of any use again. But I may still be free."

He lunged for McNeil, but Andrew pulled the woman back and out of his reach. Kuri's feet twisted under him, he flailed and caught hold of the next nearest thing. Rose tried to hold onto the railing beside her, but he was a large man and heavy. He fell backwards over the railing, pulling her with him and into the energy field.

"Rose, no!"

"Docto—"

The room was an explosion of light and burning heat. Wires sparked and the Doctor threw up his hands to shield his face. Andrew knocked the gun from Dr. McNeil's hand and then turned his back to the flare, shielding her from the heat and light. Like an exploding star, the burst lasted moments, and when it was all over, so was Dr. Kuri. The man was gone, vanished, his body disbursed like so much dust across time and space. Like Mia.

The flare died down and the heat lessened to the merely intolerable, but the energy field had expanded another two feet at least. The railing around it was melted and bent. The edge of the field was burning dangerously close to the computer banks and several exposed wires were already singed, their rubber sheathes bubbling as it melted. It wouldn't be long before the computer itself overheated and shut down.

"Rose!" The Doctor pulled himself to his feet, staring around him and up into the energy field, dreading what he would see. He fully expected to find that Kuri, Rose and Carmen had all been burned up by the surge.

"Rose!" he shouted. He leaned against the stair railing, then pulled back as the hot metal scorched his hand. The pain was fleeting, as was his relief. Rose was alive but she was trapped inside the energy field; her mouth was open, forming a wide O, the last syllable of the last word she had shouted before she fell. Carmen hung in midair, her right arm outstretched and her right hand wrapped around Rose's left wrist. Dr. Kuri was gone, but both the women were safe. For now.

The Doctor stared at the leather watchstrap around Carmen's right wrist. Andrew crouched near the door, helping Dr. McNeil to sit up.

"Doctor! They're safe. We have to get them out!"

The Doctor nodded. The energy surge had been a symptom of the field's collapse. The star was going nova, sparking erratically and sending off blue and green flames as it strained at the arms of the generator that still spun, still sought to reign in the fire.

"Andrew, the stabilizer!" the Doctor shouted. "Black switch, then blue button. I'll pull her out."

Andrew ran up the stairs to the computers, but he hesitated with his finger on the switch. "You said we only get one chance at this," he said. "There's two of them now. Can you get them both out?"

The Doctor stared at Andrew, and then looked up at the women suspended in the heart of the star. He couldn't. He knew that he couldn't, and there wasn't time. Once he put his arm into the energy field, the circuits would blow. He'd be lucky if he could pull one of the women free, let alone both of them, let alone finding cover before the computers exploded.

"Doctor?"

"I can't," he said, staring at Carmen. "I can't save them both."

It always looked so easy, saving the world, saving the girl. It _looked_ easy, but it never was. Carmen had been reaching for something all along. She had known. It was impossible, but she had _known_ where Rose would fall, and she had spent the last hour - or possibly the past hundred years - moving her hand inch by inch until she was in the right place at the right time to catch her.

The Doctor looked up into Carmen's eyes. She couldn't see him, he told himself, but she was looking right at him. Whatever shield had protected her from the time winds inside the energy field, she had extended it around Rose. She was protecting Rose, but the Doctor couldn't save them both.

"I'm sorry," he said, holding up his hand to her. Carmen or Rose, it wasn't a choice. There was never a choice. "I'm so sorry," he told Carmen, "but I think you already know that."

He stepped back from the energy field and braced himself in front of Rose. "On my mark, Andrew," he said.

"But—"

"On my _mark_ , Andrew!"

The man glanced at him and at the women trapped in the heart of a dying star. He nodded and put his finger on the stabilizer switch.

The Doctor took a deep breath. "Now!"

He heard the click of the switch as Andrew flipped it. He felt the power surge around him as he thrust his arm into the energy field. The heat was unbearable, and the light burned his eyes. He found Rose's hand without sight, caught hold of her and pulled.

The star exploded, and so did the rest of the lab.

* * *

 **Reply to guest reviewer ErinKenobi2893: Maybe... ;)**


	9. Chapter 9

**Nothing in the Doctor Whoniverse belongs to me. UNIT claims that the sentient coffee-fungus has claimed my pencils for its own. It feeds on graphite and hopes to plant the erasers as seeds to grow a pencil forest. Personally, I am optimistic, but UNIT wants to firebombing the break room.**

* * *

The doors to Dr. Kuri's lab burst open and a cloud of toxic smoke billowed into the hall, staining the grey walls and pooling overhead along the white ceiling tiles. The Doctor emerged carrying Rose in his arms. She was limp, barely conscious, and her hands and cheeks were blistered by sunburn.

The Doctor stumbled halfway down the hall, sank to his knees and laid her down gently on the floor, and then he doubled over in a fit of coughing. Behind him, Dr. McNeil and Andrew followed him out of the lab dragging the still-snoring guard. They leaned the man against the wall a little ways from Rose and the Doctor. Dr. McNeil bent over him, marking his pulse and respiration. Of them all, only the guard had managed to come out unscathed. Andrew watched Dr. McNeil for a moment, hands on his knees and sucking in dry, dusty – but unpolluted – air, and then he pulled up the collar of his shirt to cover his mouth and turned to plunge back through the lab doors into the thinning smoke.

"It's not safe," the Doctor called, but Andrew ignored him. Dr. McNeil glanced at him, but she didn't stop the boy, and the Doctor refused to leave Rose's side.

From the lab, the sound of crackling electricity and frying circuits might have been mistaken for an indoor bonfire, but the sudden and intermittent crash of broken metal destroyed the illusion. When Dr. Kuri's augmented generator had failed, the bubble it had filled with time winds and ether from the Vortex hadn't blown out the way that the Doctor had expected. The energy field, like a dying star, had imploded, pulling everything back into the time Vortex and sealing the hole shut behind it. A gap was left in the space-matter of the lab, but physics, as it is wont to do, filled the gap. Air rushed in with a final concussion that blew apart the computer banks, twisted steel railing and melted the spinning arms at the base of the generator.

Surrounded by smoke and ruins, the Doctor had picked up Rose and walked out of the room without looking back. The Vortex was closed. The world was saved for puppies and flowers and… fish and chips. He had saved Rose's life, but Carmen was gone. She had still been sucked into the Time Vortex with everything else. Whatever shield she wore wouldn't protect her in there. He hadn't saved Carmen. He hadn't saved anyone. Even Mia Chen had died because he couldn't get his damned coordinates right. He had very nearly lost Rose.

Dr. McNeil stood up, satisfied that the sleeping guard would survive. She turned to offer the Doctor her services, but his angry frown kept her back.

"We don't need your help," he said, much sharper than he had meant to. She frowned at him, and then nodded and turned her back. He could hear her speaking quietly into the intercom on her collar, giving orders and directing the emergency personnel who would most certainly begin swarming the underground corridors any minute. Somewhere, far away, a fire alarm began ringing.

The Doctor shook Rose a little more urgently. He didn't want to be around when the surprise wore off and people started asking question. He hated the clean-up.

Luckily, Rose had woken up and was sitting up slowly, holding her head. Her skin was hot to the touch, but only lightly burned. She looked around and eventually her eyes settled on the Doctor, who was edgy and eager to go.

"What happened?" Rose asked, as the Doctor helped her to her feet. "I fell. It felt like I was falling, but someone caught me."

"You fell into the energy field," he told her, "but you're alright now. We should go." He pulled at her arm, but she pulled back.

"No," she said. "It wasn't a fall. It's so hard to remember. I feel all blurry, like my thoughts are someone else's from a long time ago." She frowned. "No. I was pushed! Dr. Kuri pushed me! And he fell, too. Is he alright? Where is he?"

The Doctor sighed, but deep down, he was proud of her. It didn't matter to Rose that the man had tried to kill her, that he had almost destroyed half the galaxy with his experiments. She still asked about him. She still cared. The Doctor could only feel glad that the mad scientist was dead and gone; a man like that would be a danger to any planet he was on, at any time he was in. Rose would never see it that way. She cared about everyone, even the ones who didn't deserve it.

"He's gone," the Doctor said. "We should go, too. There'll be people on the way, and I'd…"

"Where's Carmen?" Rose asked. "Where's Andrew?"

He felt his expression freeze as he tried not to look the guilt he felt. He glanced back over his shoulder toward the smoke-filled lab. The doors were stained by the chemical fumes.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I couldn't…"

"Andrew!" Rose cried. She pulled her arm from the Doctor's hand and hurried back toward the lab.

Confused and more than a little afraid, the Doctor turned slowly and saw Andrew stumbling out of the smoke with a body in his arms. "Doctor!" he shouted. "Doctor, I think she's alive!"

Rose reached him as he staggered and fell. She caught Carmen before the unconscious woman could roll out of Andrew's arms. Her clothes were singed and smoking at the corners; her hair hung loose, twisted and brown at the edges where half her braid had been burned off. She was covered in small cuts and pinpoint bruises, and her exposed skin appeared sunburned as Rose had been, but worse, much worse. She was covered in blisters.

Dr. McNeil was the next to react, and whether it was herself or the other 'Doctor' that Andrew had called for didn't matter; she bent over Carmen as she had the sleeping guard, checking pulse and breath and looking into her unseeing eyes.

"That's impossible," the Doctor murmured. "She's dead."

"Not yet," Dr. McNeil said, beginning chest compressions. "She's not breathing."

The Doctor stood back and looked on in growing apprehension. It was impossible. It was a mistake. The energy field had been sucked into the Time Vortex. Half the lab had been pulled into the fire and if Carmen's body hadn't gone with it, her mind must have been blasted by the time winds. No human could have survived what she had gone through.

Dr. McNeil was confident and competent. She was determined. Rose stepped back to give the woman room and stood beside the Doctor, holding his hand. He looked at her and saw the hope in her eyes. For a moment, he forgot his own uneasiness and began to hope as well. He hadn't expected to forgive Dr. McNeil, but if she could save Carmen's life and make Rose smile again, he would gladly admit that the head of Gateway Institute was not entirely a bad person.

While McNeil was working on Carmen and the Doctor was standing, staring dumbly down at them, several men in fire vests and carrying large, yellow canisters arrived. The booming echoes of their feet preceded them as they came running down the corridor toward the ragged survivors. Andrew met them and directed them toward the lab, giving commands with as much certainty as McNeil herself. Jonathan appeared with a large, white case marked with a red X; he opened it and set it down beside Dr. McNeil who expertly fit an adrenaline tube onto an auto injector and pressed it against Carmen's shoulder. There was a beep and the sound of rushing air. After a moment, Carmen gasped and shuddered but she didn't wake up.

"She's breathing on her own now," McNeil said, sitting back on her heels. "Whether her mind will survive the trauma…" She shook her head and handed the injector back to Jonathan who joined two newly arrived security guards who were struggling to lift the sleeping man and carry him out of the way.

The Doctor looked around, but everyone seemed distracted and busy. No one was looking at him. He knelt down beside Carmen and touched her wrist. "Her pulse is steady," he said to Dr. McNeil. "You saved her life."

"You don't sound very happy about it," McNeil said, giving him a curious look. He shook his head but didn't answer her. She frowned and stood up to give instructions to one of the emergency workers.

The Doctor stood up, too, and quickly tucked a cracked leather wristband into his coat pocket. Not even Rose had seen him remove it from Carmen's arm. He looked down at her. Her eyes were wide open but unseeing. She was breathing, but that was the only movement she made. Her body may have been alive, but if there was anything left of her mind, then it was buried far deeper than he could see.

.

Outside the imposing edifice of Gateway, the sky had taken on the dark indigo hue that meant that daylight was less than an hour away. The heavy clouds were dropping light but large snowflakes, and Rose and Andrew took cover under the awning above the front entrance. The Tardis stood in the center of the courtyard. A pair of double-wheeled tracks led up to the Tardis doors, turned around and led back again. The Doctor had insisted on taking Carmen with him and had carried her himself into the big, blue box.

Dr. McNeil stood nearby, waiting for him and, after a few minutes, he emerged again, empty handed and unhappy.

"I am still not convinced that this is the best choice for her," the woman said. "She needs medical treatment, and she is my employee. I'll see she gets the best help available."

"The help she needs is not available in this country or on this planet," the Doctor said, shutting the Tardis doors before the curious scientist could get a better look inside.

"But you can treat her? In that little box?"

"It's bigger on the inside."

The way Dr. McNeil 'hummed' under her breath told him that she was not convinced, but he had other things to worry about. Rose was laughing and leaning a little too close to Andrew while they talked, and the Doctor watched them carefully. He already had one passenger more than he wanted; he didn't need another of Rose's boyfriends tagging along, too.

"What will you do with her?" Dr. McNeal asked loudly, and for the second time.

"You seem very interested in her future," the Doctor said.

"She is a Gateway employee. I am interested in all my employees. I take care of my people."

"You didn't take very good care of Mia Chen. Or of Dr. Kuri-Hunt, for that matter." The look on Dr. McNeil's face made him regret his words. He remembered how stubbornly she had worked on Carmen to get the woman breathing when she might easily have given up. "I'll look after her," he said in a more gentle tone. "I promise."

McNeil frowned, but she nodded. She had looked into Carmen's empty eyes and seen the burns on her hands and face that looked like nothing she had ever seen before. Radiation burns would be her best guess. And she hadn't completely shaken the habit of considering the cost-benefit analysis of her decisions. She was more than ready to be convinced to let another Doctor take over the case.

"What will happen to Dr. Kuri's research?" the Doctor asked.

"Unfortunately, the fire has completely destroyed all of Dr. Kuri's equipment," Dr. McNeil said, shaking her head. "We might be able to salvage the metal from the generator and melt it down for scrap. Whatever advances Dr. Kuri may have developed, we could not even begin to reconstruct the modifications that he made to the original hardware. The project is a total loss."

The Doctor nodded, looking up at the lightening sky. "I don't recall that there was much of a fire," he said. "A great deal of smoke, but-"

"Where there's smoke, there's fire," she interrupted him. "You were looking after your friend, concerned for her safety and rightly so. Andrew seems to think that a stray spark from the generator caught on a loose pile of Dr. Kuri's notes. The man did insist on writing everything down on paper." Dr. McNeil's words were casual, but her look was pointed. He was being given the party line.

"It really is a shame," McNeil went on. "There was a power surge when the generator failed, and the whole network database crashed. It will take days to assess the damage. Whole projects have been erased. All that research, all that work…" She smiled.

The Doctor stared at her. There was a good chance that Dr. McNeil was lying, that she had salvaged the remnants of Dr. Kuri's project and still meant to profit by it. But, somehow, he didn't think she was lying. She was a smart woman and learned from her mistakes.

"Where did you learn your resuscitation technique, Chelsey? I wouldn't have guessed that your doctorate was medical."

"It isn't. I was a medic, second-class, in the North American Army. I did two turns on the European peninsula in the war of 2022." She sighed. "I applied to Gateway because I wanted to help people. It seems, somewhere along the way, I lost sight of that."

"I seem to recall seeing a report on a very promising project involving tomatoes?"

Dr. McNeil laughed, and it was Rose's turn to look jealously at the attractive, older woman standing a little too close to _her_ Doctor.

"If you're considering a change of direction," the Doctor went on, "you'll need new management as well. I happen to know of a brilliant, young electrician whose is utterly wasted on light bulbs and circuit breakers." The Doctor tipped his head toward Andrew.

"I've already asked Jonathon to draw up the paperwork." Dr. McNeil smiled and held out her hand. "Goodbye, Doctor, and good luck. If your next adventure is anything like your last, you'll need it."

He frowned at the premonition, but Rose and Andrew were joining them and goodbyes were said all-around. There was no hint from Andrew that he hoped to join them in the Tardis, and no disappointment from Rose when the Doctor failed to suggest it.

Ten minutes later, Dr. McNeil and Andrew stood alone in the courtyard, looking down at the square of bare stone where the Tardis had been.

"Well, Mr. Chen, we must decide on a new job title for you, and there are one or two points in your personnel file that I think need to be corrected…"

.

Rose watched the Doctor dematerialize the Tardis and set the coordinate controls for somewhere else. She saw the lines of worry around his eyes and mouth but didn't need to ask. He had been anxious ever since Andrew carried Carmen's prone body out of the destroyed lab.

"Where is she?" she asked.

The Doctor kept his eyes on the controls, turning a few unimportant dials and frowning at the screen. "Resting," he said, "in the Zero Room."

"What's a 'zero room'?"

"Level four, aft section 2B-Grenich."

"What?"

He sighed. "The Zero Room is a sort of Time Lord sensory deprivation tank. The walls are specially built to block out all electrical energy, radio waves and background radiation. Everything. My people used the technology as a sort of spa treatment, but it was also used by the older Time Lords during regeneration confusion.

"Regener-what now?" Rose asked, laughing.

He glanced at her. "It's not important."

They stood in silence for a few minutes, listening to the hum of the Tardis engines.

"Will it help her?" Rose asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. "It's Time Lord tech. If she were a Time Lord…" He shook his head. "She was in there for a long time, Rose."

"A few hours! I was in there, too."

"For a few minutes," he said. "I didn't have enough time to examine Kuri's machine. I don't know what was inside that energy field. Time Energy, yes, but what kind? She was trapped for a few hours in _our_ timeline, but that doesn't tell us how long it was for _her_."

"But you put her in the Zero Room. You think it'll help her."

"It might. Or, it might just keep her alive long enough for her to go mad."

Rose stared at him. "She saved my life. She caught me when I fell into the energy field, and don't you tell me she didn't! She was reaching out before Dr. Kuri pushed me. She knew. She _knew_ where I was going to fall!"

"You can't know that, Rose. Who knows what she was thinking. Trapped between two timelines… She may not have been conscious at all. What do you remember when you were inside?"

"It was…" Rose stopped and frowned. "It was bright," she said, "and hot. And I… I wasn't in there as long as she was."

"She didn't catch you, Rose," the Doctor said, angrily. "She wasn't reaching for you. She didn't catch you. Whatever shield was protecting her from the Time Winds, _that_ was what saved you. Not her. When you fell through the barrier, your hand touched hers and the shield stretched to hold both of you. That's all." He turned away so he wouldn't have to see the tears in her eyes.

"Why are you saying these things?" Rose demanded. "Why don't you care?"

"Because I don't know if she'll ever wake up!" he shouted. "I don't know. And I don't want you to think that you owe her anything because you don't. I do. It was MY fault. I couldn't save her."

He hung his head. Rose hurried to his side and put her arms around him. "It's not your fault. It's nobody's fault. There was nothing that we could do for her. You heard the scream. As soon as she fell into the energy field she was…" Her words choked off. She remembered Gwyneth's last moments and what the Doctor had said after.

"Carmen isn't dead," the Doctor said. "She's alive, and maybe she'll wake up. If it takes a hundred years, or a thousand. If there's anything left of her in there…" He smiled and squeezed Rose's hand.

"You should take a rest," he told her. "It's been a long night, and I've got some work to do here." He put his hand on the Tardis console. "She got a bit knocked about during that landing at Gateway."

"Yeah, alright," Rose said, stepping away and heading for the corridor that led to her own room in the Tardis. Before she left the console room, she stopped and looked back. "You did save the world, Doctor. That's something to be proud of."

He didn't answer. He listened to her footsteps along the metal flooring as they faded away down the corridor and shook his head. How many worlds, how many billions of people on those worlds, had he saved, but it still hurt every time he lost.

He took Carmen's leather wristband out of his pocket and flipped open the protective cover, revealing technology three thousand years ahead of its time. The power cells were drained to nearly nothing, but that wasn't surprising. The Vortex Manipulator was built to travel _through_ the Vortex, not to hang around inside while its wearer was battered and burned by the time winds.

With the sonic screwdriver, the Doctor removed the metal casing and examined the VM circuits. The coordinates input was shot, and so was the teleport mechanism. As far as he could tell, the only thing that _did_ work was the shield, and the shock when Kuri's generator had failed had fried those circuits as well. But the shield shouldn't have protected Carmen for as long as it did. A Time Agent was never inside the Vortex for more than a few seconds. Carmen had been trapped for almost three hours. She should have been dead.

"Who do you belong to?" the Doctor whispered. He ran the sonic over the wristband. The leather was nearly an hundred years old and not original to the device, but that told him little about Carmen herself. Was she a time agent with second-hand equipment, trapped on Earth after a mission gone wrong, or just a lucky kid who had stumbled upon the one bit of alien technology that could keep her alive in a time-energy field and she'd kept it because it looked like a pretty piece of steampunk jewelry?

The Doctor put the casing back together and closed the cover over it again. His thoughts turned to the Zero Room, tucked away behind a labyrinth of corridors and stairwells in the bowels of the Tardis. He had left Carmen Ortiz laying peacefully on the floor in what must pass for sleep to her twisted mind. Her face was smooth, but he could sense the torment in her thoughts that boiled just under the surface. Maybe, in a hundred years, she would wake up again with enough sense to give him all the answers he craved. Or, maybe, she would wake up mad. What would he do with her then? Only time would tell.

* * *

 **Roll end credits.**

 **Let me know what you think. It's nice to hear that someone else is enjoying the story. :)**

 **-Paint**


	10. Ep2: The Goblin In The Stovepipe

**Episode Two: The Goblin in the Stovepipe**

 **The Doctor finds himself alone on the streets of 1930s Spain. Voices whisper in the shadows and out of stovepipes in the town of Zaragoza. The newspapers dismiss it as a servant's prank, a way to sell more gossip rags, but when the Doctor learns that half a dozen** **children have gone missing,** **he begins to suspect a more sinister motive and must seek help from a familiar stranger who has secrets of her own.**

* * *

 _This story takes place between Episode 1 and 2, Season Three. Tenth Doctor._

* * *

A little boy, six years old, walked down the deserted street, kicking his rock from one circle of lamplight to the next. He had found the rock, smooth and round and white, more than a week ago and carried it in his pocket just for kicking. As he walked along, he adjusted his hat, cocking it to one side first and then the other before settling it down over one eye. He hooked his thumb through his belt loop, proud that he had finally kicked the sucking habit. He wanted to look as tough as the older boys, and so he put a bit of swagger in his step. It looked more like a waddle with his stubby legs and ill-fitting knee-britches, but it made him feel safer to walk the lonely nighttime streets with a scowl on his face. If any of the older boys had appeared, he would have run the other way.

The boy arrived at a narrow alleyway cut behind a wall of brick, row-houses. He looked both ways to make sure no one was watching, and then darted down the muddy path. There were no lights down that way, not even an old gas lantern or the square of light from a window high up. The bright light bulbs of the street were far away.

He hurried forward, counting the doors until he came to the high wooden fence that blocked off one house's kitchen garden from the rodents and scavengers that lived in the alley. The boy knocked at the back door and waited, anxiously, bouncing on the heels of his well-worn shoes. He only had one hole in the heel of his sock, and he was proud of that, too.

Eventually, a woman opened the door. She was round-faced, full-bodied and strong and her fingers were worn down from working with them. Her long, black hair was pulled back in a knot and there was flour on her cheek and on her hands. She looked out into the alley, and then – feeling the tug on her apron – looked down. "Válgame Dios! Antonio! What are you doing here?" the woman cried.

"Tengo hambre," he said, the swagger gone from his step. He was just a large eyed, hollow cheeked child with scuffed knees and a dirty jacket. "I'm hungry, Miss Karena. Please?"

"Where's your mother? She should be feeding you, not me."

"She went with Mr. Carmichael again. Last time she didn't come home for three days."

"And she didn't leave you anything, not a crumb in the cupboard," the woman said with a sigh. It wasn't a question. She knew Maria Lucia, and the woman was as reliable as rain - never there when you wanted it but always ready to ruin a fine day. Karena looked out into the alley again, her dark eyes searching the shadows until she was satisfied that there were no more hungry children waiting to beg scraps from her if she fed this one. She tried to be kind-hearted, but street children were as bad as rats sometimes.

"Alright," she said, finally, "just this once. Wait here, and not one toe over the threshold, you hear!" She stepped back into the kitchen and returned a few minutes later with a thick slice of bread, a wedge of cheese and an only slightly bruised apple. She had wrapped the food in a piece of coffee-stained newspaper and handed it to the boy.

"Now, off with you," she said, "y tan cuidado! Mind the shadows. The streets aren't safe this time of night."

"Gracias, Karena!" The boy ran off down the alleyway clutching his treasure. The woman shook her head, shut the door, making sure to turn the key in the heavy iron lock.

Antonio ran to the other end of the alley and sat down in the shadows of a deep doorway. He tore open the newspaper and ate hungrily, swallowing the food as fast as he could chew it. There were other boys, bigger boys, who lived on these streets, and they would readily steal this feast off of him and beat him until he'd told who'd given it to him.

Someone laughed nearby, and Antonio froze. He'd eaten all his cheese and nearly all the bread, but the apple was as yet untouched. It was too loud a fruit to eat out in the open, and if one of the bigger boys found him with it – bitten or no – he would have to give it up. He listened carefully for the sound of footsteps or voices, but the night was silent. Antonio looked out from his doorway, up and down the alley, but he couldn't see anyone. An automobile rumbled past on the road nearby. Had the laughter come from the auto? Antonio wondered. The echoes off a high, brick wall could sometimes play tricks on you...

His racing heartbeat slowed, and he settled back into his doorway. He had his teeth on the apple but hadn't yet bitten into it when a voice crept out of darkness and sat down beside him.

 _Tengo hambre_ , it whispered in his ear. _Tengo hambre_ , _Antonio_.

Antonio jumped up and ran as fast as he could toward the mouth of the alley. His heart raced and his feet pounded on the hard-packed gravel but the light of the street seemed to stretch farther and farther away. He felt something long and strong and thick with hair wrap around his neck and lift him up. The last thing he saw before his vision went dark was the round, red apple that Karena had given him bouncing away from his limp hand and rolling into the gutter.

 _Tengo hambre..._

.

The lot had been empty for ten years at least. Only cats and the rats they fed on came there. Manolo and Sons had been shut down for years, ever since the old horse-and-carriage companies had been displaced by carriages without horses. A high, wooden wall encircled the lot and had been baked and frozen alternately while the seasons passed. Bales of rotten straw were still stacked against the old fence, and the remains of the animal stalls - what hadn't been broken apart and sold off for new buildings - were scattered around. In one corner, a couple of optimistic street urchins had tried to build a clubhouse. On the muddy ground, grass had been choked out by weeds which had in turn been choked out by ice and then washed away by rain.

Not a sound had been heard in that lot for ten years, and the mice in the hay bales didn't know what to make of whirring rush of engines as the Tardis materialized atop a stack of old pallets. It stood for a moment, like an ominous, blue monolith while the engines shrieked and the light flashed. One, brave rodent crept out slowly to have a sniff, but raced off again as the Tardis shifted and crunched down through the brittle wood pallets with a boom.

The engines fell silent and a moment later the door opened, and the Doctor stumbled out backwards, holding his tie over his mouth and waving away a billow of green smoke.

"Temperamental old pile of rubbish!" he coughed. He looked around at the empty lot and then up at the air. The sky overhead was brightening with the new day, but the air was still cold and in the distance he could hear automobile engines, shouting voices and the bark of unchained dogs: all the sounds of early industrial urban decay.

"Definitely not Fiji," the Doctor muttered. "The circuit coordinators are on the fritz again..." He took a deep breath and charged back into the Tardis, slamming the door behind him.

A mangy, black cat hopped up onto the fence, licked its paws and cocked an ear toward the blue box, listening to the muffled cursing of the Doctor and the grinding of the Tardis engines. there was another loud boom, and the box shuddered. The cat twitched its tail and leaped down again, running off as the Doctor emerged once more, with his coat over his arm. It was cold outside and he was stuck here for awhile. The Tardis refused to budge from this empty lot.

The Doctor locked the doors behind him and looked around. He was alone, but that was alright. He'd travelled alone before, and it had turned out alright. Whatever Donna might say, she was wrong. He didn't _need_ anyone else. And anyway, his life wasn't just one death-defying adventure after another. He could relax when he wanted to. He'd meant to be relaxing in Fiji by now, but this place would do just fine. It was Earth, after all, he knew it by sight and by smell and by the gravity under his feet.

There was a door cut into the wooden wall around the lot, and it only took a few quick pulses from the sonic screwdriver to undo the padlock and let himself out.

The alley outside was as dank and depressing as the old, empty lot. To his left, the old wooden walls stretched forward and back, and to his right, the back of a factory took up the whole next block. Even the sky above was grey and full of smoke. The Doctor was tempted to head back into the Tardis and start making some of those repairs that he kept promising himself he would make...

"Still, it's Earth..." he said, tasting the air. "Early nineteenth century, Europe. Not England, though." He shrugged his shoulders and forced a smile, but there was no one there to see it. Only silence answered him, and he missed the sound of unceasing, silly questions. Where are we? When are we? What are we going to do?

He missed the chatter, and he missed... His trouser pocket pinged at him.

The Doctor frowned and fished the sonic screwdriver out. He must have accidentally turned on the auto-scan function when he unlocked the padlock on the fence door. The device had been scanning the local area's radiation readings and must have found something unusual enough to set off the alarm. Unusual enough to peak the Doctor's curiosity as well.

"Well, let's have a look, then," he said with undisguised enthusiasm. He swung the sonic around, homed in on the signal's location and set off. He'd meant to relax, but this was only a small adventure, he thought to himself, and there was nothing wrong with having a _small_ adventure. He could quit anytime he wanted.

The sonic led him out of the alley and onto the street, down three blocks north and to the left. He stopped just long enough to buy a newspaper off a passing paperboy with a Zaruvian khol - an iron coin that looked just enough like a Spanish peseta. The Doctor scanned the headlines of the Zaragoza Herald. He'd been right about Spain. And the day was September 23, 1934.

He folded up the paper again with a frown. "Have I been to Spain before?" he wondered aloud. "Zaragoza? Why do I know that name?" A woman passing him on the street glanced at him and gave him wide berth. "You're talking to yourself, Doctor," the Doctor muttered. Zaragoza? Oh, well. It would come back to him sooner or later.

A quarter mile from the factory district where he'd left the Tardis, the sonic pinged again and led him down an alley that was even narrower than the one he'd been in before. There was hardly more than a footpath between the back of the row houses on either side. The ground sloped down on either side to a deep gutter full of several inches of muddy water and floating garbage, the refuse of a dozen families thrown out the back door.

The Doctor picked his way down the alley until the sonic flashed red in front of a doorway to his right. On the ground, a tattered newspaper lay half-frozen in a puddle of mud not far from a rat-gnawed apple core and what might once have been a crust of moldy bread. The whole pile stank, but the sonic pinged in earnest and, pinching his nose, the Doctor lifted up the soggy newspaper. The corner tore off in a jagged line where it had been frozen, and underneath was a child-sized cap, just the right size for a child.

The cap seemed to be the source of the erratic readings that the sonic had picked up, but he couldn't see why. The readings were alien to this time and place, but the cap was not. It was a plain, brown beret, nothing special or alien about it. The Doctor carried the cap and scrap of newspaper out of the dark alley into the not-much-brighter daylight of the street. Most of it was smudged out, the ink running, but the headline was large and dark and had survived.

BOY (6) VANISHES FROM SENORA PEREZ GARCIA'S BOARDING HOUSE

He squinted at the smeared text under the headline, but he could only make out a few words here and there. The boy had been playing with friends when he'd vanished. There had been other disappearances, but the police were not concerned. Children ran away all the time. Servants were lazy, etc, etc, etc.

The Doctor sighed and looked around. Children _did_ go missing all the time. It was sad, but true, and yet... the strange energy readings on the child-sized beret couldn't be a coincidence, could it? Rose wouldn't think so. She would be sure that the cap, the newspaper article, the Tardis's landing here on its own, all of it was connected, and she would have told him to investigate. She would have insisted on it!

The Doctor winced. It was mid-morning, and the streets around him were bustling with traffic. Boxy automobiles and rusty motorbuses rattled past on the uneven, paved road. Women in home sewn dresses walked out on the day's shopping while men wore ready-made clothes to work and stepped out with their sleeves rolled up at the elbow in spite of the cold, autumn air. He tried to stop one of the men, to ask him about the missing children, but all he got was a curse and a heavy lunch pail swung at him. He wasn't about to try his luck with one of the housewives.

He was about to give up and head back into the alley for another scan when a small, leather-sewn ball bounced off a wall near him and struck a pile of feedbags outside a shop before rolling to a halt at his feet. He turned and saw three young boys in knee-britches chasing each other up the sidewalk after the ball.

The Doctor picked it up, and the boys skidded to a halt in front of him. "Hey, that's mine!" the littlest boy pointed at the ball. Two women walking the other way looked up and quickly crossed the street. A group of working men nearby laughed at the scene, but the Doctor had always fancied himself good with children.

He tossed the ball from hand to hand. "Morning, lads. What's the news?" he asked cheerfully and, he hoped, encouragingly.

The first boy, the biggest of the three wiped his nose on his sleeve and looked the Doctor over. "Give it back, Pendejo."

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. Time for a different tactic, he decided. He fished into his pocket and pulled out a small, rubber ball (good for gravity testing) and a piece of hexagonal circuitry from an old image translator. He tried to juggle the three while the boys stared at him as if he were mad.

"There now," he said, struggling to catch and throw the balls without dropping the circuit or the cap in his hand. "I just wanted to ask if you knew anything about these children going miss-"

"That's Tonio's hat!" The smallest boy shouted, pointing at the beret in the Doctor's hands. "I ain't seen him in three days."

"What you doing with Tonio's hat?" the bigger boy demanded.

The Doctor fumbled and dropped the two balls. He tucked the circuit into his pocket. "Now, I can explain that..."

"He took 'im!" the middle boy shouted. "He took 'im like he took Pal!"

"Pal? Is that a friend of yours? Is he missing, too?" The Doctor could feel his grip on the situation slipping. "I'm here to help. I want to help you find your friend!"

But the boys weren't listening to him. The smallest boy had chased after his ball, but the biggest had picked up a sharp-looking stone from the pavement and was looking less than friendly. The Doctor had faced down Daleks and Cybermen, but he didn't know what to do faced with three dirty street-children with rocks in their hands.

"I'll be on my way, then." The Doctor took off down the street, running as fast as he could. Like puppies, the children saw a moving target and gave chase.

The Doctor ran to the end of the block and turned left, launching himself into a crowd of early-morning shoppers. Bumping into tables and knocking over baskets, he could hear the children shouting after him, and other voices, too. Outraged shopkeepers and women shouting. One of the boys threw a rock that went whizzing past his shoulder and shattered a shop window nearby.

The shouting grew even louder, but the Doctor kept running. He turned left and then left again and pressed himself up against the wall. He was back in the alley where he'd started from. The children had scattered when the window was broken, but two members of the local Guardia Civil had taken up the chase. The Doctor could hear the police whistles coming closer and the sound of running boots. He stepped into the nearest doorway and held his breath as the officers ran past.

He waited a moment longer and was about to step out again when the door that he had been leaning against opened up behind him and he tumbled backwards into a dark kitchen.

"Enseñeme las manos!" a woman's voice ordered him, and he heard the click of a revolver barrel being set. The dim light from an overhead window played over the grey metal held by two shaking hands.

Slowly, the Doctor raised his hands. "Why is no one ever glad to see me," he muttered, and began to stand up - no easy feat in a cramped kitchen with his hands in the air.

"No se mueva," the woman said, but he heard the catch in her voice. He'd had enough guns aimed at him that he knew pretty well who would and wouldn't shoot an unarmed man.

"I'm just going to stand up," he said, moving slowly until he was on his feet. The woman backed away from him. He could make out the shape of her body and the shadows of her face. She wouldn't be able to see him any better. "I'm not armed," he said, waving his empty fingers to prove it. "I don't have any weapons. I'm not here to hurt you. I-"

"You broke into my home, sir," the woman said. "That is a criminal act, and I will call the Guardia Civil!"

" _You_ opened the door for _me_!" he said. The woman tightened her grip on the gun. "Alright, look, I've got no weapons. Search me if you like. Go on." He held open his coat and turned around. Even in the dim light, he could see the woman's confusion. Keep 'em guessing, that was his motto. Don't give 'em any time to think.

"Hey, how about a bit more like," he said. "I like to see the woman holding a gun on me, and you don't want me making any sudden moves, do you?"

She hesitated and then nodded. Still careful to keep the gun trained on him, she stepped back and reached out to switch on the single, yellow bulb overhead.

The Doctor blinked in the sudden light and raised his arm to shield his eyes. He had a glimpse of black hair, a white face and a brown dress. She must have been nearly forty, he thought, but she had the sort of face that only hinted at wrinkles.

"There. That's better. Now, why don't we just..."

"You again!" the woman gasped.

And then the gun went off.

* * *

 **Roll opening theme and credits...**

* * *

 **I'm really excited about this one, but I have to admit, I know next to nothing about 1930s Spain, and my high school Spanish is rusted almost to unrecognition, so if you find any mistakes PLEASE let me know! I'm researching as fast as I can, but Wikipedia and Google can only get you so far.**

 ***Please Review***

 **-Paint**


	11. Chapter 11

**I own no part of the Doctor Whoniverse. I'm only a lonely tourist who can't be held accountable for any damage I plan to do.**

* * *

The Doctor sat stiffly on the straight-backed, narrow chair beside the greasy kitchen table. In the yellow light of the electric bulb, he had a better look at the tiny kitchen, the splintered wood countertop, moldy around the corners of the massive sink. The woman bustled about near the wood stove, heating a kettle and laying out two cups and two saucers and a pale blue sugar bowl. She cracked open a canister of tea and the Doctor felt his sinuses pinch at the bitter smell of the leaves and the sharp tank of damp mold.

"And you are the, ah... housekeeper here?" the Doctor asked, wincing as he watched the woman pour two heaping spoonfuls of leaves into the chipped teapot.

"I keep the house," she said, "whatever that makes me." She kept her back to him. He was surprised by that, after she had been so suspicious with the gun, but once she'd seen his face, she'd willingly put the weapon away and now she seemed to be trying to hide her own face from him. He wondered why.

The Doctor poked the toe of his shoe into the splintered hole in the floorboards where the bullet had struck before ricocheting deep into the plaster wall. She'd been as surprised as him when the gun went off. "We've met before," he said casually, as if the question hadn't been burning a hole on his tongue for the past five minutes now.

"Have we?" she said. The kettle sang. She took it off the stove and poured the tea, setting one steaming cup down in front of him with a clatter. She looked him in the eye, staring at him with a familiarity that was unsettling, but he would have sworn he'd never seen her face before.

"You've met me," he said. "You saw my face and said, 'you again'. You recognized me."

She continued to stare at him. She was forty-years-old if she was a day, but her eyes were clear and cold. He cleared his throat and looked down at his teacup.

The woman sat down across from him. "You look very much like the school friend of my youngest brother," she said, easily sipping the foul-smelling tea that he had yet to find the courage to drink. "That man came by once, drunk as a skunk. His wife had refused to let him into the house, so I unlocked the garden for him and let him sleep there for the night. I thought you were him again."

The Doctor frowned. It was a good story, and she told it like a story, too, her face impassive as she stirred a pinch of sugar into her tea. There was something familiar about her, he realized, the angle of the cheekbones perhaps, or the color of her eyes. He had never been to 1930s Spain before. He would swear to that, and he didn't know any middle-aged housekeepers either.

"How long have you lived in Zaragoza, Mrs.…?"

"Miss." The woman corrected him. "Miss Karena Andalucía. And you are...?"

"The Doctor," he said, watching her face, but there was no change in her expression.

She took another sip of her tea. "You have a strange way of meeting people, Doctor...?"

"Just the Doctor," he said, more than a little disappointed. "I was investigating... something."

"Ah, you're a doctor of medicine, then?"

"I'm a doctor of quite a lot of things actually, but what I was investigating was not medical. It was... well, what do you know about this? I found it just outside your door." He set the soggy newspaper and the child's cap on the table between them. Miss Karena's eyes widened, and he smiled, smugly satisfied to have caught her this time.

She took up the beret. "This is Antonio's cap," she said, looking at him accusingly.

"You're certain?"

She turned it over and showed him a torn seam that had been mended with the wrong colored thread. "I know my own work," she said. "Where did you find this?"

"I told you, it was outside your door. Or at least, down your alleyway. You knew this child, Antonio?"

She was looking down at the cap, turning it over in her hands sadly. "I am not the police, Miss Karena," the Doctor said. "I promise. I'm just trying to understand what's happening here. This column," he tapped the scrap of newspaper, "it's quite a coincidence that I found this bit of paper with his cap."

"I gave him the paper," she said. "I wrapped his dinner in it."

The Doctor reached out to touch her hand, but she pulled away from him. "What are you doing here? What do you want? What do you care about a few runaway children?" She threw the cap down on the table.

"What I want, is to help," the Doctor said, and he did. Whoever Karena was, she clearly cared about this missing child. "When did you last see Antonio?" he asked. "When you gave him this paper?"

She scowled at him, but then she sighed and nodded. "Three nights ago he knocked on my door. His mother had gone off without leaving him dinner, so I made him a packet."

"You haven't seen him since?"

She shook her head.

"It may be nothing," he said, not very reassuringly.

"You have today's paper in your pocket," she said, nodding to the corner that stuck out of his pocket. "Have you looked into it yet?"

He took out the paper. "I'd only read the headlines..."

She took it from his hand and stood up, unfolding it. She pushed the teacups and sugar bowl aside and spread the paper out across the table. The Doctor stood up next to her, surprised, and watched as she turned the pages until she found the column that she was looking for.

"There," she said, pointing. "Read that."

With a glance at her, the Doctor took out his glasses and bent down to read the fine print. He'd need stronger lenses if he was going to spend much time reading in this faded light.

MISSING CHILD (6): _Manuel Alvarado Sánchez was_ _l_ _ast_ _seen_ _at_ _play near the north docks_ _of_ _Río_ _Huerva,_ _Saturday_ _last. A_ _red-haired_ _woman,_ _aged_ _approximately 27_ _years,_ _in_ _servants' dress_ _was_ _seen_ _by_ _several_ _workmen_ _n_ _earby_ _and_ _is wanted_ _for_ _questioning_ _by_ _the_ _Guardia_ _Civil..._

"How many others have there been?" the Doctor asked, glancing over the rest of the page. The other columns were devoted to petty crime: purse snatchers, a peeping tom and a man seeking his run-away wife.

"Six that I know of," Karena said. She tapped her finger on the table and seemed to be considering how much to tell him. "It started three months ago, but there were rumors before that..."

"You've been investigating!" the Doctor said, eagerly. "You're a detective!"

"I'm interested," she said. "I read the gossip columns. After the family finishes the newspaper, I read the news. There was a boy I knew. He was... he went missing, and so I started reading. That was when I found... Ángel was a good boy, like Antonio. I gave him food and looked after him." She shook her head. "They were both good boys."

"Children run away."

"Ángel wouldn't do that," Karena said angrily. "His parents took him out of school when he was four years old. I leant him books and taught him to read. I helped him to keep up his studies. He wanted to be a doctor..." She swallowed the lump in her throat. "When he disappeared, he still had one of the books I'd given him. He would not run away without returning it to me."

"You sound very sure of that." Her hand was on the table, and The Doctor covered it gently with his own. She didn't seem to notice. "It's not unusual, when a boy makes up his mind to leave home… Well, I doubt he'd stop to return a book."

"The book was not mine. I took it out of the professor's library upstairs," Karena said, taking her hand from his.

"And who is the 'professor'?"

"My employer," she said. "I do not give food or books to just any child. They were good boys. They deserved better than this life." She sat down again and bowed her head over her hands in her lap. "They deserved better than whatever monster took them away."

The Doctor looked around at the dingy kitchen. The house was big enough, but the part of it that he had seen was very poor. He could think of more than a few earth-people who deserved better than what life gave them.

He crouched down beside Karena and put his hand on her knee. "You've been looking into these disappearances," he said. "Tell me what you know. Show me what you've found. It was an accident that brought me here, but I'm here now, and I'm going to help you."

She raised her head to look at him. "I don't need your help," she snapped. "No one cares. No one helps. Their own parents barely notice they're gone. The newspapers only print the stories to sell more copy, along with the other gossip. Revolts among the working class, the streets are not safe. They say that even the Church cannot be trusted to keep the peace, that it stokes violence against the people instead. So much violence here. Soon the world will be at war again."

The Doctor looked at her in surprise. How could she know? But she waved her hand aside. "There is always more war," she said. "So who cares about one missing child?"

"Or six?" he asked.

"Or six," she agreed. "I don't need your help, but you'll help them." She looked hard at him, and he saw the way the soft skin crinkled around her eyes and the creases in her skin that told him she frowned more often than she smiled. He could even see the hint of soot caught in the wrinkles of her hands from the pollution of progress in industrialized Spain. She was not yet forty, but she had lived a longer life than that, and he thought... for a moment he thought that he saw...

"Wait here," she said, standing up and pulling away from him. She hurried out of the kitchen, leaving the Doctor alone, crouched beside the table.

He sighed and stood up. While she was gone, he took the opportunity to look around, checking a few drawers and standing up on the chair to look out the high windows at the narrow yard outside: a ragged kitchen garden full of weeds and broken paving stones. Across from his window, long row of beanpoles still carried the corpses of last season's crop and a tiny shed leaned against one corner, barely wide enough for a rake and a spade. The Doctor heard Karena's footsteps returning. He sat back down in his chair and picked up his cup of tea, taking a sip before he remembered what was in the cup.

Karena stepped into the kitchen before he could spit out the tea, and he choked down the sour liquid. She ignored his pained grimace and laid a faded blue journal on the table in front of him. "There, if you want to help."

The Doctor turned the pages. The book was filled with newspaper clippings and scraps of note paper. Karena had clipped more than a dozen articles regarding the missing children (five children all together), and each was pasted onto its own page with the date neatly penciled in along the side. There were other loose articles tucked between the pages that spoke of other things, strange occurrences, missing pets and suspicious neighbors' gossip. It was all very... convenient.

"Three months ago, two days before Ángel disappeared, this was written in the daily gossip column." Karena turned to the earlier pages and pointed to the article in question. "Marisol Garcia, six years old, says that she heard a voice calling out to her from inside the family's cook stove. Her mother found her trying to climb inside."

"The paper doesn't seem to think much of it."

"No, but here, again, another girl who heard a voice, this time from the chimney grate of her grandmother's kitchen." She held up a square of note paper. "Two days _after_ Ángel was taken."

Taken? The Doctor made note of that. He took the note paper from her and sorted it among the other clippings. "The girls hear voices in chimneys and stoves. The boys go missing from streets and alleyways," he mused out loud.

"It may mean nothing," she said. "It is easier for a boy to wander alone on the streets than for a girl."

The Doctor nodded, but he was busy reading. Karena's information was very complete. Many of the notes that she had taken were dictated interviews, rumors and gossip. If it weren't for the readings that he had taken on the sonic, and the fact that the readings had been found on a missing boy's cap, he might have dismissed her suspicion as superstition, or the paranoia of a grieving mother, but as he turned page after page of newspaper clippings – each one dated with painstaking care – he felt sure that it was all connected, and that Karena knew more than she was telling.

"Have you checked the area where the first child went missing?" he asked, closing the book and tucking it into his pocket.

"How am I meant to do that?" she demanded. "Ángel's sister saw him last walking down the Calle Pascual, but it would take twenty minutes to walk that street top to bottom, and more than a dozen paths lead off of it."

"Yes. Alright. That would make the search more difficult," the Doctor agreed, reminding himself that she didn't have a sonic screwdriver that would follow the alien energy readings that he felt sure he would find. But still, it seemed that she was too eager, now that she had given him the book, to put him off again.

"Well, there are a lot of streets to cover," he said, standing up and taking his glasses off. He folded them up and put them away in his pocket. "We'd better get started."

"We?" Karena said, shaking her head. "I've sat too long with you as it is. I haven't time to wander the streets all day."

"I don't know the city, and you've done all this work. You don't want to see it through?"

"I can't help you," she said. "It's nearly noon, and the professor'll be wanting his tea." She began gathering up the cups and saucers from the table, making a lot of impatient noise to encourage him to go.

The Doctor didn't understand. He could see it in her eyes that she wanted to go with him. She _wanted_ an investigation and to find out the truth, not to be stuck washing dishes and serving tea to some dusty academic. The Doctor wasn't sad to see his nearly full cup of tea dumped down the sink, but he was, surprisingly, disappointed that he couldn't convince her to join him in the search.

"I suppose I'll be off then," he said, "if you're sure you won't…?"

"I can't. I'm sorry." And she genuinely looked it. He didn't press her. She'd given him plenty of clues to go on, and he knew that he'd be seeing her again.

"If you remember anything else, you can contact me at this address." He took a pen from his pocket and scribbled down the street name and number of the empty lot where he'd parked the Tardis.

"You have everything you need," she said, ushering him out the door. "Good bye. Good luck, Doctor." She saw him out of the house and shut the door behind him, turning the latch with a snap.

The Doctor frowned at the door, more curious about her than anything else he'd learned since landing in Zaragoza. And where _had_ he heard that name before? Where had he met Karena before?

He walked back down the alleyway, wishing that he'd been able to convince her to come along with him. Adventures were so much more _fun_ with someone else along for the ride. Someone to listen while he talked, and to remind him to act human when he wasn't. And there was something else that was nagging at him about Miss Karena. Not just that her face was oddly familiar to her, and that her manners were not at all what he would have expected from a middle-aged, nineteenth century housekeeper being confronted by a strange Englishman in her kitchen.

First things first, he told himself, as he stepped out of the alley and made his way around to the front of the row of houses. The gang of boys and the policemen must have gone about other business by now. The rush of morning traffic was over as the Doctor walked down the block and across the street. He found a convenient corner and a warm, brick wall against which to lean. From this vantage point, he could see both the east end of Karena's alley and the front door of her house. Donna thought his days were all spent adventuring, running and escaping and saving the world. What would she think if she saw him now? Standing idle against the wall. But he could be patient when he wanted to be.

He opened the clippings book and paged through the articles again, looking more carefully at the penciled in dates. The woman had clearly done a lot of work collecting columns from two city papers and three of the small, gossip rags. The Doctor turned the book on its side and looked lengthwise across the page. He smiled and shook his head. She'd been careful, but not careful enough. The earliest disappearance was indeed Ángel Perez, and the latest - besides Antonio who had not had time to have articles written about him - was Pedro, eight years old. There were many more notes on the most recent two boys. The Doctor was about to shut the book again when a small scrap of white paper fell out. It had no date and only one word written on it: Red.

That puzzled him more than anything else. "What have you discovered, Miss Karena?" the Doctor murmured, frowning up at her house. "And who are you?"

.

His suspicions were confirmed, less than ten minutes after the Doctor took up his surveillance, the front door of Miss Karena's house opened and the woman herself stepped out. She wasn't dressed like a housekeeper now, oh no. Her clothes were fine and clean, and her hair was swept up under a neat cap. She locked the door and hurried down the steps to the street. She looked around quickly, but the Doctor had already slipped around the corner and a cluster of old ladies stood between him and Karena. She didn't see him.

He watched her straighten her skirts and start down the street, walking away from him. Half a minute later, the Doctor followed.

.

Karena walked down to the market street that the Doctor had passed before. He turned up his collar and hoped that no one would recognize him, but Karena walked openly, ignoring the crowd. She stopped once to speak to a basket weaver, and again two shops later at a milliners. She stepped inside a dressmaker's shop, and the Doctor took up wall-leaning again as a hobby until she came out again carrying a long, thin, paper-wrapped package.

Karena walked on, but with a new purpose, and the Doctor had to hurry to keep up with her. If she'd thought she was being tailed before, she must have decided that she'd shaken him. She made no more stops over the next half mile until she arrived at an empty, boarded up building and stopped to fish a key from her purse. The marquee over the door had been painted over and the upper windows were broken and blocked with plywood. The street itself was like any other, a few open shops, a few rented flats above the shops, and a cluster of children rolling hoops along the sidewalk. Housewives sat at the upper windows, watching the children, but otherwise the street was empty.

The Doctor watched as Karena let herself into the shop, and then waited for the children to clear off down the street before he approached. He hurried up the front steps tried the door, but it was locked. He was about to take out the sonic again and let himself in after her, when a movement caught his eye and he turned.

Halfway down the block stood a woman in a gray dress, wearing a broad-brimmed black hat. She held a piece of paper in her hand and was looking up at the numbers on the houses on the other side of the street. She looked down at the paper again, turned and looked across the street. She saw him watching her.

The Doctor was too far away to get a good look at the woman's face, but he guessed that she must have been surprised to see him. She turned on her heels and hurried away, and as she turned, the Doctor caught sight of flame-red hair braided and tucked up under her hat.

He hesitated. He had come here following Karena, but he knew where that woman lived and could always find her again; one of the clipped articles in Karena's book had mentioned a red-haired young woman wanted in connection with Manuel Sánchez's disappearance. This woman in grey certainly had red hair, and she was about the right age. Her clothes matched the newspaper description as well. It could be a coincidence...

The woman had reached the end of the block and dashed around the corner. The Doctor, before he could second-guess himself again, he leaped the stair railing and took off after her. He could only hope that he'd made the right decision and was following the right woman this time.

* * *

 **To Guest Reviewer, Dove: Thank you so much for your kind review. This story is designed to be a collection of episodes that can be inserted into the regular timeline of the TV series, hence the skipping around. Carmen is like a cameo character who shows up occasionally and doesn't always explain her absence but, for the record, the Doctor hasn't "done" anything with her yet. He put her in the Zero Room and, as far as he is concerned, she's till in there.**

 **To Everyone Else: Please review! Your comments and questions can only make this story better!**

 **-Paint**


	12. Chapter 12

**I own no part of the Doctor Whoniverse. I'm only a lonely tourist who can't be held accountable for any damage I plan to do.**

* * *

The Doctor chased the red-haired girl down the street and might have caught her, too, but this was no deserted dystopia, no alien world where people minded their own business. He couldn't _look_ like he was chasing her. All he could do was keep to the shadows, following her, and hope that his longer legs could close the distance in time.

The streets of Zaragoza were labyrinthine, and the girl knew them better than he did. He followed her down winding roads, through alleyways and cut across back lots. Every time he thought he could catch her up, they passed a busy market street or sidewalk full of open-air cafes, and he would have to fall back. Eventually, the girl ducked through a gate onto a street, crossed over and hurried up the steps of a three-story crumbling, brick house.

The Doctor slowed to a walk and approached the building in a round-about way, pretending to examine the merchandise behind several shop windows along the way. Squeezing his way between a grocer and a housewife, and then around a cluster of workmen lounging in front of a hardware store, he made his way to a high, wooden wall pasted with adverts, things for sale and workers wanted. The Doctor stopped there a few minutes, pretending to be interested in the want-ads; he took out the sonic screwdriver and adjusted the range. He tried to scan the area around the boarding house, but no luck. There were too many people and too much going on for him to get a good reading. There was something there he thought, but he would have to get inside to be sure.

Slipping the device back into his pocket, the Doctor turned around and looked over the crowd. Every man and boy wore something on his head, a cap or a hat, beret or fedora. Most of the women wore a cap or scarf. The Doctor ran his hand through his loose, tousled hair and guessed that this was what had earned him so many suspicious looks and stink eyes since he'd first stepped out of the Tardis.

Across the street, a second-hand clothing shop was doing quick business and had several caps of various styles displayed prominently in the front window. The Doctor smiled. He'd never been one to question his uncanny good luck, and he didn't do so now as he pushed his way through the crowd and into the shop.

.

Ten minutes later, the Doctor emerged wearing a third-hand, green felt cap that only looked a little foolish when paired with his fine brown coat and blue suit. He had also learned that the boarding house next door was run by a Mrs. Sera Becerra Elizondo, a lovely old grandmother (and rather feisty, according to the winking, nudging old man in the shop) who just happened to have a single room to rent.

With a spring in his step, the Doctor tipped his new cap to a middle-aged mother pushing a pram and walked across to the boarding house; he took the stairs two at a time and straightened his tie before knocking on Mrs. Elizondo's door. He waited a few minutes impatiently, and then knocked again.

"¡Ya voy!" A woman shouted. There was a thump at the door, and then the latch turned. "¿Quien hizo esto? Who locked this door!?" She shouted again to no one in particular.

The door opened. Mrs. Elizondo was a short, fat woman with a round face and attractive, olive eyes that stared at him as if daring him to make trouble on her block. Her dress was plain and black, but a colorful apron in a floral print was tied around her waist, its single pocket stuffed with dust cloths. Her cap was pinned with a large, blue broach, and she crossed her arms under her ample bosom as she looked him over, taking in his good shoes, mud-stained trousers and cheap hat.

"Well, what do you want?" she demanded, but good-humouredly, seeing his colorful appearance.

"Señora Elizondo? I'm the Doctor." He took off his cap with a flourish. "I…"

"A doctor? Not here," she interrupted him. "We didn't send for no doctor here, sir. You might try next door, Mr. Alcocer's gout has been acting up on him."

"Ah, no, I'm not a... never mind," he sighed. "I heard you had a room to let, ma'am." He put his cap back on and took out a thin wallet from his pocket. "I'm in town for a few weeks on business, looking for a place to stay." He flashed her a glimpse of the psychic paper.

"Nordbahn Railroad?" The landlady frowned. "The railroad folks usually manage their own lodgings." She looked at him suspiciously. "What does the Nordbahn want with doctors, anyway? My Tomas helped them build the line and they made him get his own doctor when he weren't well. Didn't even pay him back the two dollars for the house call charge!"

"Ah, no. No, I'm not that sort of doctor..." the Doctor stammered. "I'm more of an independent contractor. Do you have a room? If not, could you suggest another place. My luggage is being held at the station until I have an address, and I'm really rather in a hurry…"

The old woman gave him a hard look, and then shrugged her shoulders. Money was money, and if it were railroad money, all the better. "It's a single room, rented by the week." She stepped aside and ushered him into the house. "Rent is due in full every Saturday, and one week to be paid in advance upon taking possession."

The Doctor looked around the entry. It was piled high with muddy boots and garlanded with a selection of ratty scarves and soot stained caps. The walls were cracked plastic and the floors splintered wood. One the farthest hook from the door, the Doctor recognized the black, straw hat that the red-haired woman had been wearing.

"This way, sir," Mrs. Elizondo said, pushing the Doctor out of the entryway. A narrow hall passed from the front door to the kitchen at the back, and on one side, looked into a small sitting room, on the other a dining room with two long tables and many mismatched chairs. A steep staircase was rose up to his left, and behind that was an open door to the kitchen where wood floor gave way to linoleum and the stale smell of smoke and cooking was soaked into the plaster walls. It was cleaner that Miss Karena's kitchen, at least, and better used.

"The room is upstairs," Mrs. Elizondo said, motioning him up the stairs that were as steep and narrow as a ladder.

The Doctor gripped the handrail as the dry wood creaked under his feet. Next to his hand, he heard a scratching in the walls as a rodent of unidentifiable nature scampered down behind the plaster lath.

"Breakfast is served promptly at five for the workmen," the landlady said. If she'd heard the rat, she made no sign of it. "There's supper on the table at seven if you want it. A few of the men come down for that. Eat in your own room as you like, we're not fancy here, but I find you're bringing in the roaches, you'll be out on your arse."

"I'm sure you'll have no problem with roaches here, ma'am…" he muttered. The rats would take care of them!

She glanced back at him, and he smiled as innocently as he could manage.

At the top of the stairs was the room she had to let, three doors down and right next to what must be - judging by the smell and the mold growing about the edges of the door - the water closet. The Doctor held his nose as Mrs. Elizondo unlocked the empty room and pushed open the door. The Doctor glanced inside.

It was cleaner than he would have thought, but still smelled of the damp. The white-washed walls were barely stained, and the single, cracked window had been recently washed. "Do you have many guests, Mrs. Elizondo?" he asked, scanning the room with the sonic while the woman stared at him.

"Four workmen and two families up above," she said, "plus my own, of course."

The Doctor looked out of the broken window. The room overlooked the shop next door. "And are all your boarders men, Señora?" the Doctor asked.

The landlady drew herself up. "I run a respectable house, sir. I'd not bring my family into any other!"

"No, of course not. I only ask who works for you. A maid for clearing up? A laundry service? That sort of thing?"

Mrs. Elizondo gave him a look that said what she thought of that. "We are a simple house, sir. If you want someone cleaning up after you, best to take a room at the Hotel Ria. My daughter does for me, and when she is too busy, my niece, Paola, takes her place. They sweep the halls and clean the kitchen, but your room is your own concern. An damages, I will add to your rent and I've every right to put you out if you cause any trouble."

"Yes, of course," the Doctor said, not paying too much attention. He didn't know whether the red-haired woman was a tenant here or one of Mrs. Elizondo's own family. He didn't know the woman's name, so he couldn't ask, but there was definitely signs of the same strange radiation in this house, coming from the floor below.

He remembered that several articles in Karena's clip-book mentioned voices coming from a wood or cook stoves. "There's no stove in this room," he said, looking around.

"We've a furnace, just installed," Mrs. Elizondo said. "It'll be warm enough."

"Yes, of course. Well, I'd like to see the kitchen next." Mrs. Elizondo raised an eyebrow. "I like to know where my food is coming from before I decide whether or not to eat it," the Doctor said, stepping out of the room again.

The old landlady shook her head at him, muttering imprecations against railroads and doctors and tenants in general. Down the stairs and down the hall again they went, to the kitchen at the back of the house. A new, electrical stove had been squeezed into one corner, but the original, wood stove was still active and the primary source of heat to the old building. It stood against the far wall, near the back door – outside stairs would lead down to the basement cellar where the winter firewood was stored.

The Doctor went straight to the wood stove and began scanning it with the sonic. He found more trace readings and something else. He put his head to the wall and listened, then looked behind the body of the stove itself and along the curved iron pipe. While Mrs. Elizondo looked on in amazement, he opened the door, knelt down and put his head inside.

"I don't think that is necessary!" she protested.

"Have you had any trouble with this device lately?" the Doctor asked, ignoring her. He used the light from the sonic to illuminate the inner belly of the stove; there was ash everywhere and bits of charred wood from last winter's burning.

"No trouble at all," the old woman said. "The furnace is down in the cellar now. I only use that one in winter when there's holiday cooking to be done. It has been smoking a bit..." she admitted, "but I had a man out last week and he says there's no block in the pipe. Probably just a bit of wind, or a bird's nest in the flue. We've never had any trouble in the winter months… Not that you'll be here as long as that... What exactly sort of doctor did you say you are, sir?" Mrs. Elizondo stared at him as he pulled a rubber glove from his pocket and snapped it on.

"I didn't."

A knock at the front door interrupted them before she could decide whether his money was worth the insult of an inspection. "I'll just see to that…" she said stiffly. "I won't be a moment." She hurried away, determined to summon the guardia civil if the strange gentleman wasn't out of the stove by the time she returned.

"Yes, do," the Doctor said, not really hearing her. He took a pen from his pocket and used it to sift through the ash at the bottom of the stove. Something familiar had caught his eye. It was probably just a chicken bone, he told himself, lifting the flat, white end of a broken femur. A very large chicken…

"You shouldn't do that," a high-pitched voice startled him. He nearly dropped his pen.

He pulled his arm out of the stove and turned around. A young girl, no more than five years old, was standing in the doorway, watching him. "It's alright," he assured her, dusting the ash off his sleeve. He took off his glove and held out his hand. "I'm the Doctor."

"Stoves don't need doctors," she said.

"No it doesn't. You're very right about that. What's your name?"

She looked past him into the belly of the stove. "The Goblin's gonna get you," she said.

He glanced back over his shoulder. The girl's eyes were so wide and afraid that he half expected to see a real goblin leaping out of the darkness. "What did you…?"

"Sofia!" A woman cried. "What are you doing? You know your grandmother doesn't want you in that room."

It was the red-haired woman in the grey dress. The Doctor saw her as she hurried down the hall toward the child, but she didn't see him until she was in the doorway. Sofia was pointing at him, and the woman followed the girl's finger. Her cheeks flushed red as she recognized him. She scooped up the little girl.

"Oh. I'm sorry, sir," she said quickly. "I didn't see you there. I'll take her out of your way." She turned go.

"No, wait!" The Doctor followed after the down the hall to the small sitting room where a second child, a boy, was engrossed in the construction of a pyramid of wood blocks. "I want to talk to you, Miss...?"

"You mustn't listen to the child, sir. She tells stories, her and her brother. Their last nurse liked to scare them with fairy stories. She meant no harm by it, of course. Pascualina just wanted to keep them amused."

"So, you haven't heard the voices coming from inside the wood stove?"

The woman gave a start. Her grip on the girl-child weakened enough that the child squirmed free and took up position beside her brother. She grinned at the Doctor and began bouncing up and down on her heels, singing: " _Hiding 'round the corner, underneath your bed, it whispers in the shadows, it wants to eat your head..."_

"Sofia!" The woman stared at her in horror. "Where did you hear such foolish rhymes?" she demanded.

"Pacho taught me!" Sofia was proud of the attention she was getting from the stranger, the English gentleman and she clasped her hands behind her back, beginning another verse. " _The gap behind the bookcase, the crack inside the stove, its long arms'll grab you and its teeth'll eat your nose!_ "

"Be quiet! Here!" The woman took a small, tin box off a shelf and handed it to the little girl. "Take your brother outside. I've work to do."

Sofia squealed with delight, snatched the box from the woman's hands and hurried out the door. The little boy, still nameless, stood up and kicked over his tower of blocks. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, glanced up at the Doctor without curiosity and passed silently out of the room. Once the children were gone, the woman sighed and knelt down to gather the blocks back into their basket out of the way. "Pay them no mind, sir. It's just children's games. You mustn't encourage their imagination," she said.

"Why not?" the Doctor asked, surprised. "Imagination is some of the best protection we have. If you'd seen half the things I've seen and really believed in them..."

She looked at him warily.

"But that's not important. I'm sorry, I'm the Doctor," he said, holding out his hand. She didn't take it. "I didn't mean to frighten you earlier, miss. I just... I was going to meet a friend of mine at the shop, and I thought perhaps you knew her. Miss Karena?"

"You know Karena?" the woman asked.

He nodded and put on a friendly face. He had a hundred questions he'd rather ask, but settled for, "What's your name, miss?"

"Paola Becerra, sir."

"You're Mrs. Elizondo's daughter?"

"Her niece, sir," she said. "Great-niece. She is my mother's aunt."

"You don't believe the children are making up stories, do you?" he said, looking closely at her. "You've heard the voices." Paola pressed her lips together and said nothing. "What did Karena talk to you about?"

"She wanted to know about the Duende," Paola said finally.

"Duende?" The Doctor shook his head.

Paola sighed and motioned for him to sit on the narrow sofa. She sat in a chair nearby and sighed again. "It's only a story. That's what I told Pascualia, too, but she must have told Sofia and Miguel. It's just like her to make up rhymes like that to scare the children, but it's just a story. The Duende is a myth."

The Doctor sat down across from her and leaned forward eagerly to listen.

"Duende means goblin," Paola explained. "My grandmother… Not Mrs. Elizondo, la madre de mi padre, she was raised in the mountains and used to say that goblins haunted the woods near her home. They ate the mice in the barns and sometimes took infant sheep and goats from the field. When the weather was harsh, sometimes, she said, they would climb down the chimneys of folk or into the stove and whisper to the children, telling them to come inside and be warm. Mi abuela y sus hermanos, they were always anxious around a cold stove…"

Paola shook her head. "Karena is a... a strange woman, but kind. She has been very kind to me since my brother disappeared. And she was so kind to Ángel, too, after our father passed... but the Duende is a myth. I told her. It's like the Cottingley fairies, there is nothing in the stovepipe but soot and mice. It sounds like voices, sometimes, but that's just the wind whistling in the flue."

The Doctor nodded. It was simpler, safer, to imagine mice in the walls and wind in the flue than to believe in a creature stealing children for dinner. He remembered the sound he had heard in the stairwell, larger than a mouse, too large. He shook his head.

"When Miss Karena ask you about your grandmother's goblin," he asked her, "was it after your brother went missing?"

"I only met Karena after Ángel... after he was gone. I knew that she had been looking after him. She had given him books and some old clothes to wear. When he did not come home that night, I went to her house first, the professor's house. She has a room there, and I thought she might know where he'd gone.

"But she said she didn't know," the Doctor filled in for her.

Paola nodded. "Our Papa left our ma when Ángel was so little, and he took to the streets after that." Paola sniffled. "Karena seemed to guess already, she wasn't surprised that Ángel was taken. Children disappear all the time from the streets. They are taken into the factories to work or away to Barcelona to crew the foreign ships. I'd always hoped he had gone to the ships. Ángel always wanted to have an adventure. I always thought that he would write when he had a chance..." She sniffled again and took a handkerchief from her pocket to dab her eyes. "He has been gone these three years now and no letter. I thought I'd made my peace with that."

"Three _years_?" the Doctor said. Karena had told him that Ángel had gone missing three _months_ ago. The dates in her clip-book were all from the past three months. "You were on your way to Karena's shop, weren't you? Did she ask you to meet her there?"

Paola nodded. "Sometimes she disappears for weeks on end. I don't know where she goes, but Anso brought me a note from her this morning, asking me to meet her at that address. I had not been to the shop before, but I knew she had it from her grandfather."

The Doctor thought about that for a moment. Had Karena sent word to Paola _before_ he burst into her kitchen, or had she slipped away while running her errands to send the secret note? Did she know that the Doctor was following her? She might have arranged for him to meet Paola. It was pretty convenient that she had that clip-book on hand, just waiting to be given to him. He wouldn't put it past Karena to arrange for the Doctor to meet this woman as well, Ángel's sister. Hadn't Karena had told him to his face that Ángel had disappeared three months ago, but Paola said three years, and who was the more trustworthy woman?

Paola tucked her handkerchief back into her pocket and looked into the cold fireplace thoughtfully. "I still see Pascualia, sometimes, in the shops. She got a place on Gaston Gator Calle. She's been telling stories about voices in the stovepipe there, too, I've heard. She always said my abuela's Duende reminds her of the old German witch, the one who lured children into her oven to cook them?"

"Hm, what?" The Doctor gave a start, remembering the small bone he had found in the wood. "No, that's a Grunting. That species died out long ago in Austria…"

"What?"

"Oh, nothing. Just a story," he said quickly. "Miss Paola, when you hear these voices, what do they say to you? Have you ever spoken back, asked it questions, I mean?"

"There is no voice," Paola insisted. "It's just the wind."

"Of course, but have you tried speaking to it?"

She shook her head. "Sofia says that it won't answer her," she said quietly. "She says that the goblin only tells her little things, that it's cold, that it's lonely... that it's hungry."

The Doctor felt a shiver down his spine, a sensation that he wasn't used to feeling. In spite of her protests, Paola really did believe that there was something in the stove. She was afraid. Afraid for the children and afraid for herself. That Karena had believed her had been a relief, but the woman was unreliable, unstable. The Doctor wondered how much of what she had told him had been truth, and how much had been lies.

"Ah! There you are, sir," Mrs. Elizondo cried, appearing in the doorway like a rising bulwark. She spotted Paola, red-eyed and unhappy, sitting in the easy chair with the Doctor perched nearby, and her smile vanished. "Sobrina, you have work to do. Where are the children?"

"I sent them outside to play. I was just gathering up Miguel's playthings so they wouldn't get under the gentleman's feet." Paola dropped to her knees and snatched up one of the blocks that she'd missed earlier. "Lo Siento, tía," she said, dropping the block into the box and hurrying out of the room.

The older woman watched her go.

"You have a lovely family, Mrs. Elizondo," the Doctor said, standing up. He was eager to get out of the house and back onto the streets to investigate his new leads. "If you wouldn't mind, I have a few questions…?"

"Out!" the landlady shouted at him, pointing to the door. "¡Fuera de aquí! You're not here about the room. You are no doctor. We are a clean house, and safe. No gossip! No comment! I want no newspapermen here! I will not have my nephew's name dragged through the mud for some gossip column. Not again! Go!."

She shoved the Doctor down the hall and out the front door. Half an hour after he'd entered, he found himself back on the front steps to Mrs. Sara Becerra Elizondo's boarding house. Sofia and Miguel were on the sidewalk below him, drawing monsters on the pavement with stubs of colored chalk, but he didn't dare question them about the creatures they drew lest their grandmother appear and order him off again.

He didn't need any more stories, anyway. And he certainly didn't need a room in a building with rats crawling up and down inside the walls.

Rats, he mused as he made his way down the stairs, around the children and started down the street again. It was early afternoon and the crowds were heading home for lunch. Paola had told him more than enough to go on. He knew what he was looking for, and it was no goblin. He could find the creature easily enough with the Tadis sensors, but Miss Karena was a problem he hadn't seen coming. Her story was unraveling. The clues she'd given him were adding up to easily.

The Doctor took out the clippings book again and turned to the earliest pages. Above the article that reported Ángel Becerra's disappearance, Karena had penciled in the date: 06 09-19334. Earlier in the day, when he'd had little reason to suspect, he had missed that slip of her hand, the extra three where she had written the year, and what if that number four wasn't a number at all?

0609-1933A, and the next article would be dated 0644-1933A. He'd seen notation like that before, but it wasn't an Earth calendar date.

He snapped the book shut. First things first, he decided. The Duende was the simplest of his problems here, and if he was right, Ángel, Antonio and the others were already dead. He couldn't save them, but he could stop any more children from going missing. He would capture the goblin and save the day, and then he would have a quiet word with Miss Karena.

* * *

 **Response to Guest Reviewer: Dove - Thanks! Those are all very good guesses, but I'll never tell... at least not for a few more chapters. No spoilers! ;)**

 **Happy New Year, Everyone! My resolutions are to keep up with this story and to learn how to cook something other than pizza and sandwiches. At least one of these I have some hope of completing ;P**

 **-Paint**


	13. Chapter 13

**I own no part of the Doctor Whoniverse, but I'm looking into rental properties or perhaps a Time Share, nothing too flashy, just a little bungalow somewhere within flying distance and not too far off from** **the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy...**

* * *

With Karena's book in hand, the Doctor wound his way through the streets of Zaragosa. He took the long way back to the Tardis, passing by three of the places mentioned in the articles, and at each stop he took readings on the sonic. Sometimes the signal was weaker, sometimes stronger, but always there was the hint of something alien still there, a trace on the pavement, a scent in the air. The Doctor was so distracted by his search, and by the bustling sights and sounds of the era, that he never thought to look up. His eyes were on the ground and the streets around him. Even if he had looked up, it was unlikely that he would have noticed the shadow, the shape of a creature, round and long-legged, about the size of a small dog, that loped along the rooftops from chimney to chimney, from dormer shadow to dormer shadow and under the lattice of the eaves. It was following him, close behind but always above, out of sight.

In the late afternoon, the Doctor stopped to buy dinner off a young man at a vegetable stall. As he paid for his meal, he thought he caught a glimpse of a shadow over his shoulder, but when he looked up, there was nothing there but the setting sun just sunk behind a factory's second floor. With a frown, the Doctor walked on. A moment later, a shadow detached from the corner of the factory's roof and scampered off again. It didn't usually hunt in daylight, but for this new prey, it had made an exception.

.

The house on Calle Moncasi had been in the Garcia family for nearly three generations. It was purchased by Miguel Nevares' grandfather and he passed it on to his eldest daughter – along with a great deal of debt. The house was, by this daughter, paid off quite soon after her marriage, although the husband of Maria Garcia Nevares managed to enjoy his property for only two years of marital bliss before he was killed by an eastern fever while travelling on business. He left his young wife and infant son alone in the world, which was perfectly acceptable for Maria Garcia Nevares.

Mrs. Nevares raised her son in strict austerity until his twenty-first birthday, after which which she took herself off quietly after his father.

Like his mother, Juan Miguel Garcia-Nevares had little use for society or people at large. He was a bookish child, who became, in due course, a studious young man before he finally settled on a career as a reclusive, erudite old man. He wrote many papers, some of which were even published in obscure magazines where they were read and made fun of by other scholarly old men. He taught actively at the local university, and actively patronized its cafes and clubhouses, until the ripe old age of seventy-six when his colleagues conspired with the dean to have him respectably retired.

It was at this point in Professor Nevares' life that he realized all a man ever really wanted in the world was a good book, a warm fire and a cup of tea. Soon after that – realizing that he was not the sort of man who would ever stoop so low as to stoke his own fire or brew his own cuppa – he advertised for a housekeeper.

As poor as the professor was in friends and social dignity, he had inherited a great deal of money on his father's side and had saved up every peseta of his own more-than-acceptable salary. He had money, and a long line of hard-working women and girls passed through his door over the next two year trying to get at it. Miss Rosita Perez Alvarez was considered the record-holder, having passed a full sixteen days under Prof. Nevares' roof before she gave her notice by way throwing a book at the gentleman's head.

After two years of searching, the Professor began to despair of ever finding a housekeeper to suit him – and his neighbors began to wonder whether it would not be better for the old man to hire a sturdy nurse than a willowy washing-up girl.

The professor withdrew his advertisements, and the following day, Miss Karena Andalucía knocked on his door. The advert she presented was crisp and yellow with age, and her references were unpronounceable, but the woman was even tempered, patient to the point of frustration, and she had the uncanny ability to know exactly what the Professor would demand a full minute before he knew it himself. His tea was at his elbow before he knew he was thirsty, his dinner was cooked before his stomach reminded him to be hungry, and whether he was preparing to complain that his bed sheets were too hot or too cold, they were always perfectly comfortable when he lay down for sleep.

Karena herself had little to worry about. The old man paid well and spent most of his time at his studies. Her only difficulty was in occasionally tracking down the obscure books that he required for his obscure studies and making sure that she got to the packages first so that he wouldn't find the other books, rarer and even more difficult to find, that she had ordered for herself. With such a diligent woman to look after his affairs, Professor Nevares was able to retire from the world completely. He signed the checks that Karena gave him to sign, ate the meals that Karena gave him to eat, and disbelieved everything he read in the daily paper.

For many years the two got on, happier than most married couples, and if you were to ask any of the professor's neighbors, you might think that they still get on to this day. The professor had no family to inherit his money, and so there was no one to ask after his health. And if the families who live on either side of a gentleman's home don't ask questions when he doesn't once leave it during the five years leading up to his death, they certainly won't ask when he fails to leave it after.

And yet, for all their neighborly indifference, quite a few people would have been quite surprised to learn that Professor Juan Miguel Garcia-Nevares has spent the past two years peacefully buried under the beanpoles in his own kitchen garden.

.

With a deft hand, Miss Karena folded and tucked away the last of her skirts in a drawer. There was no real reason to do it. She knew that she would never set foot in this house again, but she'd lived there for more years altogether than just about any place else besides her childhood home. She was reluctant to leave and was putting off the inevitable. On the bed behind her was an old carpet bag that she'd picked up on her last trip to Madrid. It was half-full of extra clothes, the papers that she would need, forged letters of credit, and extra cash just-in-case sewn into the lining. She'd first put that bag together two years ago after the professor died, and had only added a bit more cash and a second revolver. In that bag was everything a girl could need when fleeing to a foreign country.

Karena shut the dresser drawer with a bang and scowled. She didn't want to leave yet. She hadn't planned on leaving for another fifteen years at least, but the Doctor had a way of sticking his nose into places that it didn't belong. He was already suspicious; she'd seen it in his eyes. He'd be back with more questions, and she would have to be long gone by then.

Still, it had been a comfortable old house while she'd lived in it. Even after the old Prof died and she'd lived there alone, she had everything she could want. She might have sat out WWII without being so much as a blip on the radar and then flown to America to wait out her remaining years and complete her mission.

Something scratched at the window, startling her, but it was only an old tree branch. She felt her heart beat faster. It had been a long time... a long time, indeed.

Karena made sure that the window was latched, and then took up the carpet bag and left her room for the last time. In the hallway, she patted the pocket of her skirt once, making sure that the envelope was still there. Karena didn't know why Paola hadn't met her at the shop as she'd asked, but she guessed that the Doctor had had something to do with it. Karena would rather have given Paola the money in person, but the postal service was reliable enough. She would have to mail her money and her apologies. She couldn't give Paola the explanation that she needed, but at least she could offer the woman some help for the future. Ángel was dead; Karena had known that for a long time now. She didn't know what had killed him, or the other boys, but the Doctor was here. He would figure it out. She'd practically gift-wrapped the mystery for him.

The hall leading down from the servants' quarters was dark and dusty. A gleam from the lamplights outside showed where her skirts had swept the pale wood clean, but the carpeted stairs were grey and ghost like. Karena was not much of a housekeeper when there was no one paying her to clean. The portraits on the walls looked out of the shadows, dark and twisted like alien faces.

A shadow passed by her on the stairs, going up as she went down; she had seen it before and nodded to it as to an old friend. She wasn't sure whether it was the past of the future. There were doors in this house that had not been opened since before the old man died. Karena refused to give her opinion on ghosts, but she had long ago learned that the distance between déjà vu and premonition was as short as a gasp and as quick as a wink. It was important to keep your options open.

She left her bag in the foyer near the front door and stepped across to the dark library. The sun had gone down, making the white tablecloth look ghostly in the dim light from the streetlamps. She switched on the electric lighting and the shadows fled. Karena pulled back the tablecloth and looked down at the mess, old radio parts, bits of butchered transmission equipment, and rows of small tools for electrical work. She had spent years working on this project, all for nothing. There was no time now to finish it, or to clean it up.

She rolled up her notes and pocketed a handful of circuitry. The rest, she didn't need. The Doctor would come back to the house, looking for her, he'd clean up anything that she left behind. Not that it mattered, really, there was enough alien-tech floating around the dealers and antique shops of Earth that a bit more wouldn't make any difference.

Karena looked down at her work, the wires that she'd cut and spliced, the circuit boards that she'd built. She frowned and glanced up at the old clock on the mantelpiece. It hadn't been wound in half a decade and the hands were stuck at quarter past three.

"Six o'clock," she murmured. "There's still time enough to..." She didn't want to finish the thought.

Karena took two books from the shelf and added them to her carpet bag. She took a pen from the drawer of the small table in the foyer and quickly addressed the envelope for Paola and pasted a stamp in the corner. With the envelope in her pocket was the corner of newspaper that the Doctor had written his address on. That street was not far from Karena's own house, and there was a postbox between here and there, she knew. She could post Paola's letter, have a look around, and be back at the house by eight o'clock with enough time to collect her bag, hail a taxi and be out of town before midnight.

She touched the Doctor's thin scrawl with the tips of her fingers, her thoughts far away from taxicabs and telephones. There was a fire in the kitchen stove, and she was tempted to burn the paper and make her escape, but something stopped her. The thought of fire, a memory burned into her thoughts like an exploding star. She couldn't leave yet. She had to take one last look before she went, and she had time. She drew a long, gold chain out from under the collar of her blouse. She fingered the silver key that hung at one end, touching the cold metal to her chin thoughtfully.

Yes, she had time, more time than she knew what to do with these days. "I wonder," she murmured, catching the key blade between her teeth. The Doctor hadn't recognized her, but that didn't tell her when. "I wonder…"

There was only one way to find out.

* * *

 **Response to Guest Review: Dove - You're so sweet! I wish you had a profile on the site so I could write you long, long answers and explain everything. For now, I must leave an apology instead of an explanation. But all will be made clear in time.**

 **Next chapter: the Doctor and Miss Karena meet again in rather dramatic fashion, and we'll be learning more about this mystery woman and just what is her connection to Carmen Ortiz...**

 **-Paint**


	14. Chapter 14

The Doctor reached the Tardis just as the sun was setting over the horizon. He caught a glimpse of it between the buildings to the west and stopped to admire the glow. He had looked both ways before letting himself into the empty lot, and then around the lot itself before letting himself into the Tardis. A bright blue police box wouldn't have attracted notice in London, but he doubted very much that they'd been exported to Spain.

He shut the doors and let out a long-held sigh. No matter how many strange sights he saw, what exciting adventures he'd been on - or troubles he'd started - the Tardis was the closest thing he had to home. He took the stairs two at a time, running his hand over the brass railing, and leaped up to the central console. He pulled an upper level and the view screen dropped down from above displaying a map of Zaragoza with railroads crisscrossing the winding streets and the blue line of the Ebro cutting through the center of the city. The Doctor fit the sonic screwdriver into a small socket in the console and synced the device to the main sensors. The view screen flickered for a moment as a dozen spots of red and blue appeared over the map. He had taken enough readings that the Tardis was able to extrapolate from them, scanning the whole city for ten miles around and picking up on any similar radiation.

It was just as the Doctor had begun to suspect, but that didn't make him feel any better. "Rats," he said. "It _would_ be that simple, wouldn't it."

He punched in a few coordinates, zooming in on Mrs. Elizondo's boarding house. The strongest radiation readings had come from there, but there was something else, not far away. A purple glow hovered over Karena's shop, as if the Tardis couldn't decide whether there was radiation there or not. The Doctor had scanned the shop in person and hadn't seen anything amiss, but the Tardis obviously thought differently. He checked and rechecked the coordinates, but there was no mistaking it. Something must have been shielding the readings from him when he'd stood on the street. Radiation that matched Mrs. Elizondo's boarding house and something else... photon radiation, just a trace but it was enough. Nothing in the '30s should have made that much noise.

He zoomed out again and retraced his steps, finding the Professor's house where Karena worked. "Curiouser and curiouser." He scanned the house but there was no sign of radiation there, no more than was natural for a planet in the midst of a technological revolution.

Back and forth, the Doctor scanned the city, looking for every form of radiation, radio wave or sonic vibration that could account for it. Very little of this mystery made any sense to him. The disappearances, sure, that was easy, but he couldn't think how Karena fit into it. Photon radiation in her grandfather's shop? The only thing that could generate that sort of energy, and still be small enough to fit inside a two-story building, was a powered down travel pod with an outdated stardust drive. Small engine, two passenger capacity and no room for cargo. He hadn't seen anything like that for years. If it was a travel pod that he'd found, then the question became, how did it get to 19th century Spain? Who had hidden it there. There was only one person he could think of.

The Doctor shut down the view screen and pushed the keyboard away. He stood over the console for several long minutes, frowning to himself, but he couldn't think with all this quiet.

Not for the last time, he wished that Rose was with him, or Donna, or even Captain Jack and his Hollywood smile. Anyone to break the silence pounding in his ears. He had gotten out of the habit of consulting himself. "Well, what are we going to do now, Doctor?" he asked no one but himself.

He knew he had to confront Karena before she did anymore damage.

"And I've got to get a look inside that building," he said, ejecting the sonic from the console and tucking it into his coat pocket. "Rats are one thing, but this is bigger than rats. Big, hungry, radioactive rats..." He clapped his green, felt cap onto his head and spun on his heels. "Once more into the breach!" he cried, charging out of the Tardis and back into the cool Spanish night.

He locked the doors behind him and was about to turn around when he felt suddenly dizzy. The night seemed darker than it had been a moment ago, and the ground rippled under his feet. He watched the gravel tumble back and forth, frowning and for a moment taken aback.

"Localized spatial distortion," he said, puzzled, and was about to bend down to examine it more closely when something hissed above his head. The Doctor was reminded of the Mara on the planet Manussa and shivered. He looked up, slowly, and looked into the slant yellow eyes of a shadowy creature. He stumbled backwards, but the shadow sprang and a great, heavy weight landed on his chest, throwing him backwards onto the ground.

The earth rocked as if he were lying in a boat. His arms were heavy and moved as if he were in a dream and they were something apart from him. He could see the lamplight in the distance and a gleam of eyes and teeth. He threw up his hands and felt the teeth sink into his arm. The Doctor gave a shout, but the creature had already coiled its long arms around his neck, cutting off all sound. Its grip tightened, and its mouth opened. The Doctor wrenched his head aside, and the creature's teeth snapped at air inches from his face.

 _…_ _long arms'll grab you and its teeth'll eat your nose…_

The Doctor's eyes widened. So this was Sofia's goblin... He'd been expecting something smaller.

The creature snapped at him again, and the Doctor twisted his body, flinging himself from side to side but he couldn't shake the thing off. It was strong than he was and it was determined. If he'd had the sonic screwdriver in his hand, he might have sent out a sonic burst to stun the creature and disrupt the spatial distortion that was making it so hard for him to think and to move, but the sonic was in his pocket and if he put even one arm down now, he was dead.

The Goblin's arms squeezed tighter and tighter, like a snake wrapped around his chest. He felt his lungs squeezed. Every breath he let out, there was less and less room to inhale. His own tie was choking him. There was no way out, the Doctor realized. He had no backup plan for this.

" _Tengo hambre_ …"

He gasped. He could feel himself beginning to black out. Time Lord or not, he couldn't survive without air. Why he hadn't listened to Donna!? What made him think that he could travel alone?

" _Tengo hambre…"_ The creature hissed.

"Estoy enojada."

The woman's voice seemed to come from far away, but the loud bang that came next was so close that it made his hearts skip a beat and his ears ring. The Goblin shrieked and unwound its arms from the Doctor's neck. There was another bang, and the Doctor shoved the creature away from him. It shrieked again and fled. Karena followed the creature's path with the barrel of her gun, but before she could shoot again, it had darted behind a stack of old hay and vanished into the thick shadows.

"Too bad," she muttered, lowering her weapon. She'd managed to graze the thing's back with her second shot, but it had been moving too fast and the same distortion that had twisted the Doctor's sight had made it hard for Karena to get a bead on her target.

The Doctor wheezed and tugged at Karena's skirt. She looked down and saw him gasping, pulling at his tie. "What's wrong with you?" she asked, and if he hadn't been half-suffocated, he might have noticed that her Spanish accent was gone and she was speaking perfect American English now.

"Can't… breathe…" he gasped, pulling weakly at the tie. The Goblin had pulled the knot tight and he was too oxygen starved to unfasten it. Karena crouched down and tried to help, but she couldn't get her fingers in.

"Have you got a knife?" she asked, looking around. The sharpest thing nearby was a broken two-by-four.

"Pocket," the Doctor gasped. "Left… front… pocket…"

She tried the coat pocket first, then the breast pocket of his suit coat. She found the small pocket knife in the left pocket of his trousers and carefully cut the tie from the Doctor's neck. His face was bright red by the time she had him free, and he doubled over, sucking in air gratefully. He leaned back against the Tardis, pulling his shirt collar loose and rubbing his sore throat.

Karena watched him, curiously, with his knife in one hand and her gun in the other. "Are you alright now, Doctor?" she asked. She looked at the tooth marks on his coat sleeve, but it seemed the fabric had taken the worst of it.

He stared at her in disbelief. "I was attacked by a mutant space-rat, almost choked to death, and you've cut to ribbons my second-favorite tie," he gasped. "I can't say that any part of that sounds 'all right' to me!"

She shrugged and looked a bit sheepish. "You might say 'thank you', at least," she muttered.

Before he could say what he thought of that, a movement caught his eye. The goblin had crept out from the behind the hay bales and was inching back towards them with its teeth bared, ready for a second round.

"Behind you!" The Doctor pointed.

Karena spun around and raised her weapon. The goblin saw the glint of silver, hissed and darted away. Karena fired twice more, her bullets striking the wooden fence as the creature swung itself over and dropped down on the other side. In the distance came the clash of metal cans and a dog barking. The goblin wouldn't try them again, not when they were ready for it. It knew better than to face down an armed enemy without the element of surprise.

Karena waited a moment, listening, her gun trained on the shadows. The Doctor jumped to his feet and snatched it away. "Put that thing down," he snapped. "You're going to hurt yourself... or someone else!"

"I wasn't!" she snapped, brushing the dirt from her dress where she'd knelt when she cut off his tie. "You might say thank you," she said. "I saved your life. Twice."

"I had everything absolutely under control. _Completely_ under control!" he insisted, rubbing his neck. "Mostly… under control." He bent down to pick up the surviving scraps of his tie. He looked at them sadly and then tossed the bits away. He took out the sonic screwdriver and crouched down to scan the ground where the Goblin had been.

Karena watched him warily. "Do you know what that creature is?"

"I know what it _was_ ," he said, checking the readings on the sonic.

"What it was?" she pressed him.

"Yes, was." He struck the sonic against his palm a few times, rechecked the readings and sighed. There was no doubt left in his mind what had happened. And he had a fairly good idea of how.

The Doctor stood up and slipped the sonic back into his pocket. "You've heard of the Sempry," he said.

She shook her head. "No."

"Sun rats," he told her. "That's what they're called on Satellite 5, anyway. Imuse, on Memory Alpha. Maddening little beasts at the best of times. They're like rodents on an ocean liner, infesting space ports and ship docks across a dozen different galaxies. Slow to breed. They're not considered an invasive species, but they'll clean out a spaceship's protein rations if they're not kept under control." He shook his head. "This one is big. Too big. No wonder it's been going after larger prey, but…"

He turned to look at Karena and seemed to see her for the first time. "It really is quite the coincidence, you showing up here, now. Just in time..."

She looked up, startled. "To save you? Yes, that is a coincidence. Maybe you should thank me," she said quickly.

But the Doctor was not to be distracted. "What were you doing here?" he demanded.

"Does it matter?" She inched back toward the door in the wall.

"It matters to me," the Doctor said, catching hold of her arm. "How did you know where to find me?"

"You left your address," she said, "or did you forget that?"

He had, actually.

"And this is yours, I think," she said, holding out his knife. He reached for it, but she refused to give it up. She stepped up close to him, close enough for him to smell the gunpowder on her hands and see the soot caught in the creases at the corners of her eyes. He felt sure that he had seen her somewhere before. She wasn't from Earth, not if she brought that travel pod, but from where? She looked at him, waiting - but waiting for what? She was certainly waiting for something from him.

"It's your turn, Doctor," she said impatiently.

"My turn?" he echoed. "My turn for what?"

She stared at him in disbelief, and then with disappointment, but she recovered quickly and held out her hand. "My gun," she said. "I'm giving yours back. You give me mine."

He hesitated, convinced that she'd meant something else. Reluctantly, he handed her back her gun, and she released his pocket knife. "For the record," he said, "this is a tool, not a weapon. That is just for shooting people."

"If you say so," she said, tucking her own back into her skirt pocket and turning to leave.

He caught her arm again. "You still haven't answered _my_ question," he said. "Why did you come here? I've seen you somewhere before."

"In my kitchen, this morning." She tried to twist free but he held on.

"No. I mean, yes, but not only there," he insisted. "I've met you before today."

"No, you haven't."

"But you came looking for me," he said. "Why!"

Karena shook her head. "I wasn't looking for you," she said. She looked past him, and the Doctor followed her gaze. "I was looking for her."

"The Tardis?" he said, not expecting that. "You're after the Tardis?"

"I'm not _after_ it," she said, walking toward the big blue box, smiling as if she were meeting an old friend. "I wanted to see it again. The big ol' big, blue box." She ran her fingers over the worn, wooden side. "It's been a long time."

For all his confusion, the Doctor was enjoying this. There was nothing predictable or expected about this meeting. Karena had never met him, but she knew the Tardis? There was an intimacy in the way she touched the handle of the door. But he _knew_ that he knew her, but they hadn't met... yet? He was practically giddy, eager to discover the truth.

Karena's fingers curled around the door handle. The Doctor opened his mouth to speak and then a sudden, burst of light blinded him. The lamp on top of the Tardis lit up green and glowing as an explosion like St. Elmo's fire poured down the side of the box and licked up Karena's arm. She was thrown back from the door as if she'd been struck by a bolt of lightening and hit the ground before the Doctor could make a move to catch her. He stared up at the Tardis, then down at Karena, then back up at the Tardis.

"What? How...!?" The lamp had gone out again and the green fire was gone. "It's never done that before," the Doctor said. "The Tardis should have grounded itself the moment it materialized. Any residual static would have ben let off hours ago..."

"I don't think it likes me much," Karena muttered, holding her head.

"It doesn't have to like you," the Doctor said. He fit his key into the lock, wary of more shocks, but the Tarids was silent. He unlocked and opened the door, and then hooked an arm around Karena's waist. He helped her to her feet. "C'mon. Let's get you in out of the cold," he said. He was eager to get the woman into the Tardis where he could keep an eye on her and get some answers to his questions, but when he tried to walk her into the policebox, the doors slammed shut in his face and the lock clicked into place.

"Hey!" the Doctor shouted, pounding his fist on the door. "Who's in there? Open up!" He tried the key again but this time the lock wouldn't even turn. He'd been frozen out.

"Perhaps if you let me go, you could try again," Karena suggested.

"Not on your life," the Doctor said. "I'm not letting go of you until I've got some answers."

She didn't look to happy with that, but he tightened his grip and she sighed. "We can't stand out here all night," she said. "Back to my place, I suppose."

"Lead the way," he said, nodding toward the door that led out of the lot.

.

The Doctor had learned his lesson well. He kept his eye on the rooftops as they hurried down the street from one circle of lamplight to the next. He didn't seen any strange shadows, but twice he thought he heard something scampering along behind him. Each time, when he looked back, there was nothing there, but still he told Karena to let them in through the front of the house. One tragedy had already occurred in that back alleyway.

Goblin or not, that creature was dangerous.

The house was dark when Karena let them in. She waited until the Doctor turned his back to peer out of the front window, checking whether they had been followed, then she kicked the carpet bag farther under the table and push the library door shut with her heel. The Doctor heard the door latch click, but by the time he turned back around, Karena was walking down the hall toward the kitchen.

"I'll put the kettle on, shall I?" she said easily.

"Not on my account," he said, following her. "No, thank you."

In the kitchen, he didn't sit down but leaned heavily against the counter still worn out and sore from the Sempry's attack. Karena sat in her usual chair. "I'm surprised you don't like it, Doctor. It's a green variant of the Bejoran Deka, good for the trials of time-travel. I discovered it some years ago. It is a bit of an acquired taste..."

"You can drop the act," the Doctor said. "I don't know who you are, but you are not what you are pretending to be."

"And what am I pretending to be?" she asked, annoyed.

"Innocent."

She raised an eyebrow, surprised, but didn't argue with him.

"Was there ever a professor living here," he asked, "or was that a story, too? Like your brother. You don't have a brother, or a grandfather."

"I do, in fact, have both, but they're not around here. And there was a professor. Professor Juan Miguel Garcia-Nevares. This was his house and I worked for him. He left it to me when he died."

"Did you kill him?"

"I did not."

He sighed and sat down across from her, running his hands through his hair. He leaned back and stared levelly across the table at her. "You've lied about everything else today. Why should I believe you now?"

"You've seen killers before, Doctor. Do I look like a killer to you?"

"Yes. I think you do."

She sighed. "Alright, but do I look like a _murderer_?" she asked.

He scowled, and then he frowned. "You may not be a murderer, but you are certainly a liar," he said, angrily.

"Something we've always had in common, Doctor," she said, smiling fondly.

"I've never lied to you," he said.

"Not yet, but we both know it's only a matter of time."

He stared at her, and she stared right back at him. They were at an impasse, but he had one last card to play. He took the clippings book out of his pocket and set it down on the table. He waited a moment, to give her a chance to fess up, but she said nothing. He opened the book and turned to the second page. "That is not an Earth date," he said, pointing to the neat, penciled line.

Karena frowned and finally looked down at the book. She followed his finger. He could see the exact moment that she realized her mistake. Her eyes widened and her face when pale. She sat back in her chair and let out a long breath. "I may have written the date down wrong..." she said weakly.

"No, you did not. You may not have _meant_ to write it that way, but the date was correct. 0609-1933A, Thirteen years ago in ICN, the interstellar calendar notation used by the East Intergalactic Trading Company. You work for them," he said, snapping the book shut in his hand. "You think you're the first surveyor I've met looking to plunder Earth's resources? This planet is protected _. By me._ "

Karena rolled her eyes. "I'm not here to plunder anything," she said. "And I don't work for the EITC. I use their ships for travel sometimes. They fly everywhere across the nearest three galaxies. I learned the notation because it helps to read the shipping schedule."

"EITC doesn't take passengers. They are legally barred from doing so. Anyway, the liability is too high."

"I never said I was a passenger."

"There's a lot you're not saying, and what you _do_ say, I can't trust."

"Frustrating, isn't it," she grinned. "Now you know how I've always felt."

"I don't know you," he shouted, standing up. "I've never met you before in my life."

Karena slammed her fist down on the table. "Damn it, Doctor. They were your rules, not mine! It is not _my turn_!"

"I don't know what that means!"

She stared at him, searching his face, and the look in her eyes made his blood run cold. "You don't, do you?" she said quietly. "You really don't remember..." He couldn't shake the feeling that he had seen those eyes before, that look on her face, confusion and betrayal. She stood up and reached for the clippings book. "I'll just put this away, then."

As she stretched out her hand, he saw the braided leather wristband on her arm. He recognized the EITC remote engine monitoring device that all ship captains wore, but she said she didn't work for them. And then it struck him, where he'd seen a wristband like that before, on another hand reaching out... reaching for him, for help... He suddenly knew where he had seen those eyes before.

"Carmen?" he said. She stopped short in the doorway with her back to him. "Carmen Ortiz," he said. "You're the girl from Gateway... but you can't be. I put you in the Zero Room myself. You're in the Tardis."

"Am I?" Karena said without turning around. "But that's impossible, Doctor. We've never met before. You don't know me."

"No, we haven't met," he agreed. "We never met. You were suspended in Dr. Kuri's energy field by the time I... but you met my companion, Rose. She spoke with you. She fell into the energy field, too, and I... I had to..."

"You pulled her out and left me there." Karena turned around. "You saved her and left me to die."

He could see it now, the eyes, the face. Her hair was dyed black, and she was twenty years older, but it was her. He knew her now. "That's why the Tardis attacked you!" he said, putting the pieces together. "Because you're still in there. It couldn't let me carry you inside, not with another version of you already… But you're older, twenty years older at least. It was only three years ago! Carmen Santiago Ortiz, it's impossible."

"You've done quite a lot of impossible things, Doctor. What's one more?" She shrugged her shoulders. "But it hasn't been three years, or twenty, either. For me, it's been a lot longer than that."

* * *

 **Whew. Sorry, this last one got away from me. It's been a bad couple weeks. Still...**

 **Big surprise, or not at all? Shame on the Doctor for not recognizing his own long-term passenger :P**

 **-Paint**


	15. Chapter 15

**I own no part of the Doctor Whoniverse, not even a rental property, I just tell people I do so I'll get invited to the better sort of parties.**

* * *

 _"It hasn't been three years, or twenty, either... for me, it's been a lot longer than that."_

Karena stood at the counter with her back to him, fidgeting with the teapot and lukewarm water from the tap. The Doctor had refused another cup for himself, he'd drunk enough bitter brew that day: Carmen Ortiz alive and twenty years older - or more than twenty years. Carmen Ortiz living in 1930s Spain. It was impossible. Had he left her there?

He was glad she had her back to him. When he looked into her middle-aged face now, all he could see was the young red-head, her face framed by the yellow fire of Dr. Kuri's magnetic time-energy field. When the Doctor had ordered Andrew Chen to pull the plug, the time-bubble had popped and she should have been sucked into the vortex and killed, her mind should have been trapped in the gap between worlds, the space between the words on the page. No human mind could have survived that, but here she was, safe and whole as far as he could tell, and at the same time, the other Carmen... the _real_ Carmen... was still floating unconscious in the Zero Room of the Tardis.

He remembered: a different body, a leather coat, standing on the cold cobblestones in the courtyard outside Gateway while the orderlies wheeled up Carmen's body on a gurney. He remembered the sound of the blood rushing in his ears and the deadweight of her in his arms as he'd carried her out of the cold and into the Tardis. He remembered the echo of is own lonely footsteps on the steel walkway that led down into the bowels of the ship, down to the Zero Room where he'd laid her to rest, turned his back on her and shut the door.

And then, he had forgotten all about her.

It was hard to admit, but he didn't have to. She had seen it in his eyes when she looked at him. He had forgotten her as soon as he'd shut the door. for three years - his three years - he hadn't once gone down to check on his passenger. How many times had he run through the diagnostics on the Tardis console, checking for faults and repairs, but the stats coming out of the Zero Room hadn't been important enough to note. Was her heart still beating? Was her brain still active and repairing the vortex damage? Was she in pain? Afraid? Was she lonely down there? He never bothered to check.

The Doctor had chosen Rose, knowing that it could mean Carmen's death. And Carmen knew that, too: he hadn't just forgotten her. He had _tried_ to forget.

"You sure you don't want another cup?" Karena asked, turning around, her own luke-warm tea in her hands.

He shook his head. "How long has it been? You know me pretty well, it seems. We must have travelled together at some point...?"

"At some point," she agreed, sitting down again. "The Tardis told me about you, too, and... other places... I won't tell you your future, Doctor. Would you tell me mine if you knew it?"

He wouldn't, he knew, but he was the Time Lord. He was supposed to keep that sort of thing to himself. "How many years has it been since you left Gateway, then?"

"Since you abducted me, you mean? I didn't bother to count." She smiled, and thin, angry lines creased the corners of her mouth. "I've crossed a dozen galaxies since then. What's a year out there? Do I count the years I spent in stasis? In a cryogenic freeze? Or the years in your Zero Room, do they even count?" She shook her head. "I spent a decade on a planet where a day is twelve hours and a year is twelve times twelve days, and now I'm back on Earth, almost a hundred years before I'm due to be born. You tell me how old am I, Doctor, and then I'll tell you how many "years" it's been since you stole me away from my home!"

He could have told her, he realized. A quick scan with the sonic screwdriver would tell him exactly how many objective "years" she'd been alive, but he hesitated to do that. Her hands were balled up in white-knuckled fists, and he felt sorry for her. He felt sorry for what he had done to her. Not just for taking her from Earth, but for whatever else had happened to create such anger in her.

They sat in awkward silence for several moments until he realized something else and laughed quietly to himself. "Genesis Nine," he said.

"What?"

"A planet where a day is twelve hours and a year is twelve times twelve days. It was Genesis Nine, wasn't it?"

She nodded, surprised that he had guessed it, but she knew that she shouldn't have been surprised. The Doctor knew everything, didn't he? "I crashed on a couch in the Temple of Nadir-dal, with the monks of Kadju."

"Ah, right. Very nice temples there, very… purple. And over ten thousand years old, if you believe the brochures."

"You're a time traveler, you don't know if it's true?"

"I never bothered to check," he said, tapping his finger to the tip of his nose. "Sometimes the story is better than the truth."

She smiled and her gaze grew distant. "Every night, for ten years, I walked in the Kirkali at sunset, looking for trader ships. I saw the lamp lighting ceremony on the Avenue of Sorrows… Three moons eclipsed over an emerald sea…" She sighed. "It wasn't all bad, I suppose, but there's no place like home, with the ground under your feet, the stars you grew up... and the gravity! I've been on more planets and space stations and ships with their own artificial gravity than I ever thought could exist, but nothing feels exactly like home, does it?"

"No, it doesn't," the Doctor said, feeling a pang of sadness. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what? You haven't done anything yet." She looked away.

"No," he agreed, "but I know what it means to lose your home."

She scoffed. "Yes, well... you're not so sorry that you won't do it again when the time comes," she said. "I am angry, and I have a right to be. You abandoned me. I thought I'd moved on, but when I saw you again… _this_ you, wearing _that_ face again…" She gestured to him as if he were a beat-up old overcoat that she thought she'd got rid of only to find it stored up in the attic years later. "After all this time, I've finally found my way back home - a bit early, I'll admit, but still it's… it's Earth, right? Home. And then, of course, you show up here, too, and ruin everything." She looked around at the dingy kitchen and dusty corners, at the dismal house that she'd stolen from a dead man.

He watched her carefully, now that she'd looked away from him. He hadn't missed what she'd said: this face, this version of himself. She wasn't talking about the big-eared, northern incarnation that he'd been when he first saw her at Gateway. When he'd seen her she was trapped in a time vortex, running on a completely different space-time continuum. She shouldn't have been able to see him...?

Of course, she had lied to him before, she might be lying to him now. She was subtle and clever, and he knew nothing about her. She knew a _lot_ about him. What she'd said about missing her home… he had no doubt that she knew exactly which old wound she was poking on him with that remark. But could he ever be sure? She wouldn't tell him his future, and he knew nothing about hers. Not yet.

"So you've been travelling the universe and ended up in Spain," he said casually. "I would have thought you'd aim for North America."

"It wasn't my choice." She leaned back in her chair, watching him as closely as he was watching her. "I suppose I can tell you that much. Since, it has nothing to do with you…"

Of course, the story she told him wasn't entirely the truth. It wasn't even half of it, but she still didn't trust him, and the truth was embarrassing. It was difficult, because she really was proud of the way she had gotten herself home, and she missed being around people for whom space travel was as natural as hopping into the car and driving downtown to do the shopping. On Earth, in this era, even cars were considered new and exciting, and women weren't supposed to be scientists or engineers. Her hard-won technical skills were wasted here, and she still had a hundred years to wait for her pop-culture knowledge to be relevant.

It wasn't a very long or very complicated story that she told him, the beginning was the truth, at any rate. She had met an EITC captain at a space port where her ship was being held under suspicion of being stolen - it wasn't stolen, exactly, but until she could pay her holding fees, she couldn't exactly explain that to Station Security. Captain Lujean had been willing to overlook her legal difficulties and sign her on for a two month stint as his ship mechanic. Officially, EITC used only galactic union labor, but in practice, they often hired hobo workers from distant space ports who would trade work for a quick ride outta town, no questions asked.

Lujean had agreed to get Carmen's ship out of hawk and cargo it. The second-hand, rust-bucket of a ship was small and only carried enough fuel for short trips, a billion miles or so at the most, hauling supplies between planets and satellite moons, but she had modified the fusion system and Lujean's route took his ship as close to Sol, and Earth, as the EITC usually flew. It was a calculated risk, but she'd been stuck on the station for six months already and the last thing she needed was a run-in with the Judoon while she was still, technically, being held under warrant.

"So, you hitched a ride and this captain of yours dropped you off near to Earth," the Doctor said, nodding.

"Yes, well..." That wasn't exactly how it had happened, but it was close enough. "I left them just this side of Pluto," she said, "and set my sights on home."

"And hid your ship in the mountains somewhere?"

"Hm?"

"Your ship," he said. "I expect you've hidden it somewhere. Where is it?"

"It, ah... I flew it into the sun," she muttered, her cheeks flush red with embarrassment. "The engines failed just past Saturn. Momentum carried me close enough to Jupiter, and I used the gravitational pull to slingshot around it and pick up enough thrust to get me to Earth. Lucky, really. If I'd been a week sooner or later, I would have died." She laughed. He didn't. She cleared her throat and went on.

"I steered it as close to Earth as I could, set the autopilot and ejected in the escape pod. The ship crashed into the sun - it was junk, anyway - and I piloted the pod down just north of here. I bandaged my wounds, hid the pod, and hitched a ride into the city to start my new life here as Karena Andalucía de Santa Cruz." She sighed and shrugged her shoulders. "That was ten years ago. It took seven for me to save up enough money to hire a wagon and horses to bring the pod out of the forest and into the city so that I could repair the engines. The life-support shielding was damaged in the crash, but I've been able to convert the fuel cells to run on kerosene. There should be just enough juice left for one more trip."

"One more trip where? Where will you go without life support? You can't fly above the atmosphere." The Doctor marveled at the woman who used to be a twenty-three year-old intern from Gateway and was now talking about slingshot maneuvers and flying a space ship as easily as her younger self would drive a car.

"To America, of course," she said. "Where else would a girl go in this day and age? The pod won't fly above the atmosphere, but I don't need it to. It's only a couple hours across the Atlantic. I was going to wait a few more years until I could pass for a war refugee, but things are different now… You're here."

She stood up, smoothing her skirt with her hands. She smiled at him. "It was good to see you, Doctor. I never thought I'd say that again." She held out her hand, but he refused to take it.

"You're leaving now," he said, pushing back his chair and standing up, "with the Sempry is still out there? What about Antonio, and Angél? What about Paola, your friend?"

She winced but shook her head. "You're here now. You'll take care of them," she said with unwavering confidence. "It's what you do. You've shown up in the nick of time. You'll save the world. You don't need my help." She put the dishes in the sink and turned to go.

The Doctor opened his mouth and then closed it again. She knew him better than he thought. She was right and he didn't need her help. The Sempry would be simple enough to take care of, just a few traps in their nesting places and relocate them to a distant world. The bigger creature would be more difficult, but no worse than an invasion of Cybermen or an invasion of Living Plastic murder mannequins... but that wasn't the point. He didn't _want_ to take care of it on his own.

"You can't go," he said quickly, stopping her. "It's... it's still my turn, isn't it?" He didn't know what it meant, but he hoped it would keep her here.

She shook her head, sadly. "Those were your rules, Doctor, your game. At least, you let me think that they were your rules. I guess not, if you're just hearing about it now." She sighed and squeezed his hand. "I'll see you around, Doctor."

He followed her to the door, the old loneliness creeping up on him. He'd lost Rose and Jack. Donna had refused to travel with him, and now Carmen was leaving him behind. "Why don't I just take a look at your ship before you go," he said quickly, grasping at straws. "I don't want the engines giving out on you halfway across the Atlantic…"

"I've already had a look at them," she said, picking up her carpet bag from beside the door. "What would you know about an obsolete stardust drive, anyway?"

"I know quite a lot about quite a lot of things, actually," he said, smiling, but deep down, he was worried. She had just confirmed that it was her stardust drive that he'd seen connected to the Sempry's appearance in Zaragoza. That was information that he'd keep in his pocket for awhile, a card that he hoped he wouldn't have to play. Before he could think of something else to say, a telephone rang from behind the closed door beside them. Carmen gave a start and shot a glance at him.

"You have a telephone here?" the Doctor said, looking toward the sound. A phone was unlikely in this old house, especially in this era, but it wasn't unheard of and he wouldn't have given a second thought if she hadn't looked so terrified. The phone rang again.

"Someone seems pretty eager to get ahold of you," he said.

"They'll call back. It's nothing for you to worry about," she said quickly. Too quickly.

"Why don't I take a message?" he said, reaching for the door.

"No! You can't…!"

But he had already gone through to the next room. The Doctor switched on the lights in the darkened library and stared at the mess of radio equipment on the table. He had expected parts of her ship, maybe stolen or smuggled alien artifacts, but not this. Near the side of the table was a square, black, rotary telephone – or the rough equivalent of one – with a bundle of wires plugged into the back of it. The technology was advanced for the era, but not anachronistic… unless you recognized the very crude, blinking field-interface stabilizer plugged into one side.

The phone rang again. Carmen stood motionless in the doorway, watching as the Doctor picked up the receiver and held it to his ear.

"Hello?"

Carmen strained to hear through the crunch of static on the phone, but she couldn't make out the voice. The Doctor listened for a moment and then turned and held out the receiver to her. "He's asking for you, for Carmen Ortiz," he said, his face was white as a sheet.

She took the phone and expected the Doctor to stay close and listen to what was said, but he stepped away and leaned back against the farthest wall, his eyes on the floor, his forehead pinched in thought. She turned her back to him and lifted the phone to her ear.

"¿Bueno? This is Carmen," she said. "You? How did you get this number…?" She glanced at the Doctor. "Oh. Of course…" She frowned and listened for a moment. "She did? When? Are you sure?… of course. No, I'm so sorry for your loss… Well, what do you want me to say? This isn't a good time... Y-yes…" She glanced at the Doctor again. "It's alright, I'll see you soon… Yes, I can know that. You'll be fine… You're just upset right now. Don't worry. You'll see me again soon. I promise… Goodbye, and… Goodbye." She hung up the phone and leaned heavily against the table.

"A friend of yours," the Doctor asked, casually, but he was watching her through narrowed eyes.

"I suppose he has been. Sometimes," she said. She looked down at the Frankenstein-phone on the table. She wrapped her hand around the thick rope of wires that connected it to the field-interface stabilizer and yanked them free. There was a metallic chime from the rotary base and the pale light of the stabilizer flared and died out. "Telemarketers always call at the worst time, don't you think?"

She turned back to him with a too-wide smile. "Well, are you ready to go?"

"Go? Go where?"

"You wanted to take a look at my ship, didn't you? See me off, safe and sound? No time like the present." She walked past him into the front hall again, leaving the battered telephone behind.

The Doctor wasn't about to protest, but he stopped long enough to snatch up the primitive field-interface stabilizer and slip it into his pocket, then he followed her out of the library. You couldn't leave that sort of technology just laying around. Someone could be hurt. Clearly, someone already had been.

* * *

 **So, yep, re-post, sorry if you got excited. I've finally gotten back to writing this and had to make a few changes, update a few new ideas. No worries, a new chapter will be posted in the next day or two :) Happy weekend!**

 **-Paint**


	16. Chapter 16

**I own no part of the Doctor Whoniverse, but I stayed there once in an Airbnb rental. The house was a mess, and the neighborhood was full of hipsters, but the food was four out of five stars so it wasn't a total loss.**

* * *

Karena hurried down the street, putting as much distance as she could, as quickly as she could, between herself and that horrible telephone. She regretted ever building the darn thing.

The Doctor kept pace with her easily, and his thoughts were on her phone as well, and the strange call that he had answered. For a moment, when the man on the other end had asked for Carmen Ortiz, the Doctor had had an eerie feeling of familiarity, as if he had heard the voice before. Or, not the voice, but the tone of the words themselves. But that was impossible. The voice had asked for Carmen. Carmen or Karena? Who was she? The Doctor himself didn't know what to call the woman beside him. She spoke as if she'd known him for years, but he'd known her for less than a day.

He asked the obvious question. "Who was that on the phone? A friend of yours?"

"Hm? Yes, an old friend, off and on." She glanced at him. "You didn't recognize the voice?"

He kept a straight face and said evenly, "No. Why? Was it someone I know?"

After a moment, she shook her head. "No, it's no one you've ever met before," she said honestly. Then again, with the Doctor, you never could tell… "Hurry up. It's not an official curfew, but after the work riots, the guardia have been increasing their patrols, and we don't want to be stopped looking like this!"

"Like this? Like what?" he hurried after her.

Karena laughed. The Doctor may not care what it looked like, but she knew exactly what would be thought of them by any face peering out the window of any one of the houses they passed by on the street. She was a middle-aged woman wearing a fine but disheveled dress with a much younger man trailing after her. Had the Doctor always had that look about him, like an eager, curious puppy seeing the world for the first time? Oh yes, the Guardia would have a lot of questions for the pair of them if they were seen out this late at night.

The Doctor gave up that line of questioning and tried another. "Where did you find a field-interface stabilizer?" he asked. "You might be resourceful enough to sneak an elephant-sized space pod through the middle of the city without raising eyebrows, but you certainly couldn't have built one of those in your basement."

"No, I built it in the library," she said. "I got the specs from the Tardis years ago, and I built that thing myself. It took a couple years, but I only had spare parts to work from." She saw his incredulous look and smiled. "You're not the only clever doc around here, you know."

"Apparently." He thought about that for half a block and then asked another obvious question, "Why?"

"Why what?" There was next to no traffic on these back alleyway roads that she was taking him through, but she still looked both ways before crossing the street.

"Why did you build a field-interface stabilizer? Why did you attach it to that telephone? Of all the things you could have done with that technology, why did you do that? Who were you trying to call?"

She stopped walking, and looked up at the night sky. He looked up, too, but the lingering smoke of ten thousand automobile exhaust pipes and at least as many factory chimneys obscured what little they might have seen of the distant stars and stained the silver half-moon a sickly brown color.

"I've been here, on Earth, for thirteen years, Doctor. Do you have any idea how long I spent making my way across the galaxies, just trying to get here?"

"No, I don't." He really didn't.

"I wanted to get home," she said, "but I never thought any farther than that: getting here, stepping out onto familiar ground, looking up at that ordinary yellow sun in the sky…" She shook her head. "Maybe it was stupid of me to think that I'd be able to pick up where my life left off, that night in Gateway, but at least I thought I'd return closer to my own era. I'd've been glad to arrive years after I'd left, even, at some point where I could lead a normal life again."

"But you ended up here, a hundred years before you were born," he said. He could understand her disappointment.

"They don't have television here!" Karena cried, forgetting her own warning not to draw attention to themselves. "No computers worthy of the name, no phones. Not even those boxy old cell phones that my parents used to complain about, the ones that dropped your calls and had tiny screens that you could barely read. I'm _bored_ here, Doctor. I'm sick of this place." She looked away and hung her head.

"You were trying to call me," he realized. "You thought that I'd give you a ride somewhere else."

"Anywhere else! Anywhere that's heard of space travel outside of a fiction novel!" She smiled at him timidly. "I thought we could travel together again," she said quietly, "forget what had happened between us, forget the old arguments. We could just be friends again." She sighed. "But we were never friends, were we? Not really. I always thought there was something strange when you looked at me, like you were seeing someone else. You said once that you'd met me before, and I thought you meant at Gateway. But you didn't. You meant here, now. You were picturing me, old and bitter." She laughed sadly and started walking again. "Water under the bridge," she muttered. "Matter through a black hole."

The Doctor walked with her silently. He wished he knew what had happened between them. What old arguments was she talking about? When had they travelled together? "I could make a few calls," he offered. "I'm sure I could find someone nearby who could give you a lift over to the next star system. I'd give you a ride myself, I would, but with the other you already in the Tardis… You understand, it's impossible."

"Can we just forget it," she said. "That phone never worked right. I must've tried it a dozen times and it never rang through. Just my luck that it would work tonight." She shrugged her shoulders and put on a smile. "Anyway, I've got a plan B, don't I? And I'm doing alright for myself here. You didn't come here to rescue me, so we should get this over with, get you on your way and get me back to the States."

He looked at her, but she was staring straight ahead. They walked the rest of the way in silence, and the Doctor was grateful for that. He had more than enough to think about already. Even though the streets around them were empty, he couldn't shake the feeling that they were being watched. They reached the shop and Karena let them in.

The front room was dark with only a bare gleam from the streetlamps outside to make it through the grimy, paper-covered windows. The Doctor reached for the light switch on the wall next to him.

"Don't touch that!" Karena said, catching hold of his arm. "The valve is rusted solid and the seals are all cracked." She pointed to the gas lamp on the wall overhead. Its glass dome had an inch of dust and cobwebs layered over it.

"The property was neglected after the Professor's father died. It's never been wired for electricity. Wait here a moment." She struck a match and lit a small, kerosene lamp on a shelf near the door. By its dim light, she made her way across the room to the counter at the back wall. The Doctor thought it was strange that she walked around the empty space in the center of the floor, but maybe the floorboards were weak in that place.

Karena ducked down into the shadows behind the corner and a moment later, a bright, electrical light flared. The Doctor blinked and squinted at her as she stood up holding a small, battery-powered lantern with an adjustable leather strap. He recognized the style of lamp; it was the sort usually favored by low-level ships' maintenance engineers. The strap could be fastened onto an arm or around the waist as the engineer crawled through cramped coolant pipes or down cable shafts, making small repairs.

"This way," Karena led him through a door to the back of the shop. As the Doctor passed, he looked around the front room. The building had clearly been abandoned for many years. Without thinking, he walked over the place on the floor that she had avoided, but there was no give under the floorboards. It felt safe enough to him.

"They used to build carriages in this place," she told him as they walked down a short, narrow hall that opened into a much more spacious room in back. Her lamp was too small to light up all the corners, but he calculated from the echo of their footsteps that the room took up the whole of the back of the buiding, with the ceiling actually being the roof two stories up. "The automobile drove them out of business, and the Mr Navarres, senior, bought the property. Navarres, junior, kept the title and died still convinced that the real estate market in this neighborhood would recover."

"It's a fitting place to hide an outdated space pod, anyway," the Doctor said. He took the lamp from her and approached the pod for a better look. The casing was covered in dust just like everything else in the building, and it loomed up like a ghost ship cresting the invisible waves in a space museum.

The pod was about the size of a large carriage, oblong and pock-marked from its long journey. What landing gear it might once have had was gone; Karena had propped it up on two huge blocks of wood, probably the same base that would have held up the body of a carriage fifty years ago. Two double-barreled thrusters stuck out the back like aerodynamic canons, their skirts scorched and flaking with bubbled paint – Even a small pod like this should have been able to withstand a heat of several thousand degrees, but the casing of the left thruster had cracked under the strain. A long, black fissure wide enough for the Doctor to put his hand inside, had opened up from the edge of the skirt all the way through to the engine block.

The weight of the engine at the back meant that the pod sat with its tapered nose in the air. The Doctor raised the lantern as high as he could. The cockpit had sustained a fair amount of damage as well. A huge dent on the underside showed where the first impact of landing had been, and the glass dome over the pilot's seat was cracked, which meant that the airtight seal had been compromised. Even if the life support and climate controls were still functional – which the Doctor doubted, having seen the crack in the engine block – they would be useless outside the protection of Earth's atmosphere.

"Well?" Karena asked. "What do you think?"

"I think it belongs in a scrap yard," he said, "or a museum. Where did you dig up such a relic?"

She didn't say anything.

The Doctor found a wooden stepladder nearby and dragged it over to get a better look at the engine. The sonic screwdriver made short work of the rusted bolts that held the cover down, and he lifted the heavy, metal lid and shone his light inside.

He gave a low whistle. "You've done a lot of work in here," he said, and she had. Almost the entire engine had been refitted, the standard fuel tank replaced with a huge, iron casket, and the ignition switch rerouted toward the front cockpit. "You've modified the fuel injectors?"

"Unfortunately, there's a severe lack of photon drive-compatible jet fuel around here," she said. "The engine runs on regular gasoline now. I suppose I should thank the new automobiles for that! But the filtering system didn't like the viscosity of the new fuel, so I had to switch the automatic injectors to manual."

He raised an eyebrow. "You'd be lucky to fly this thing ten miles, let alone six thousand. This thing will never get you across the Atlantic."

"Of course it will. Here." She forced her way up onto the stepladder next to him and pointed to the bypass wiring. "That's the computer circuit there, see, and next to it is the manual override. I used a clone chip from the navigation system to create a… well, a sort of cruise control. I only have to work the injectors for a couple minutes and then the computer will be able to repeat the sequence. If there's trouble, storm winds or turbulence or something, I can cut in again to modify the sequence, but otherwise it's automatic. Semi-automatic," she said, grinning at her own cleverness.

It was clever, the Doctor had to admit, but it didn't solve all her problems. "You replaced the fuel tank," he said, nodding to the iron casket.

"It was damaged on reentry," she told him.

"And the waste fuel storage?"

"There wasn't room for the new tank so I had to remove it."

He tried not to look at her. If she saw his face, she would know what he was thinking. "With all this damage, the waste storage cells must have been compromised, too. There may have been a radiation leak from the coolant system…"

"I think I can handle a little radiation, Doctor," Karena laughed. "I'm far too old to have any more children, thank you! This building is empty, and so are the shops on either side. Besides, I ejected the fuel storage cells…"

"Where?"

She sighed and climbed down from the ladder. "Into the ocean, where else? When I realized I wouldn't be able to land this thing properly, I ejected what was left of the fuel, the storage cells and the coolant system, anything that might have been ignited by the impact. There may be a few more two-headed dolphins out there than there were before, but that won't cause any lasting damage. It'll be decades before the oceans are depleted, a few fish more or less now won't matter."

"I'll remember to tell that to the dolphins," the Doctor muttered.

"What?"

He shook his head. "Nothing," he said. He hadn't found what he had been looking for, and the dolphins were smart enough to know a radioactive fuel storage cell when they saw one and to steer clear. He reached up to shut the engine hatch.

"You've done about all that can be done here," he admitted. "With what you've had to work with, I'm impressed. I couldn't have… couldn't have done…" As he lowered the cover, the light from the electric lantern passed over a small, dark corner of the engine block near to where the fuel storage cells should have been. He hadn't seen that before because he'd been looking at the engine itself, but something round and white and iridescent, was hanging against the side of the compartment like a cluster of deflated balloons. He felt his hearts sink as his worst suspicions were confirmed.

"You couldn't have done what, Doctor?" Karena asked, smugly. "Couldn't have done a better job that I've done? That's high praise coming from you."

"Carmen where did you say you got this pod?" he asked.

"It came with the ship."

"The ship that you crashed into the sun?"

"Yes, well, there weren't many other places I could've crashed it, were there? I couldn't very well put it down on the moon, could I? And I watched the Venus landing when I was a kid. There was no wrecked spaceship for the astronauts to dig up there, either."

"Where did that ship come from?"

She frowned at him and turned away. "I told you, it was mine."

The Doctor jumped down from the ladder and touched her arm gently. "The _truth_ , Carmen. I can't help you if you don't tell me the truth. It wasn't your ship. Where did you get it?"

"I didn't _steal_ it, if that's what you're implying," she said angrily. "I earned that ship, fair and square." The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "Well, I earned it, anyway."

"That captain didn't take you on out of the goodness of his heart, did he? EITC doesn't fly this close to Earth's solar system, and their ships never leave their trade routes. At least, not officially…"

"Lujean was doing some trading off the books," Karena admitted. "His last engineer had skipped out and he couldn't hire a union worker under EITC contract because he couldn't be sure he wasn't hiring a corporate spy..."

"And?" the Doctor prodded.

"And… he needed a mechanic who wouldn't ask questions. I needed transportation off that lump. I told you, the ship I'd had before was confiscated by security. They figured I couldn't leave without it, but Lujean had an old junker in his hold. He'd been told to drop it at the EITC yards for scrap, but he'd held onto it, thinking he could fix it up and sell it down the line."

"So the captain offered you that ship in exchange for your work," the Doctor said, nodding. He was beginning to understand Carmen's way of doing business, and the trade certainly sounded like something she would do.

"I'd been on EITC ships before and knew the layout," Karena explained. "Plus, I'm small enough to fit through the maintenance ducts. You hire a contract engineer, they're big, burly guys, and you've got to pay for two, sometimes three assistants just to crawl through the ducts for him. I agreed to six months work in exchange for an obsolete planet-hopper and Lujean's word that he'd drop me off outside the Sol system."

"But he didn't keep his word, did he?"

She shook her head. "He said I was too good to abandon on a primitive rock in the middle of nowhere, tried to sign me on for another year. He promised to bring me back to Earth after the year was up, and when I refused, he said he'd keep me on one way or another…" She shrugged her shoulders.

The Doctor couldn't help remembering that the reason she'd been forced to trade deals for a ride home and negotiate with aliens like Lujean was because _he_ had taken her from Earth in the first place and he – some future version of himself – had abandoned her somewhere on the other side of the galaxy.

"I signed the contract," Karena went on, "he thought I was resigned to spending another year with him, but as soon as he took his eyes off me, I sabotaged his engines. He didn't drop me off at Pluto. We were still almost a billion miles from the Sol system, but I had no choice. I'd been working on the planet-hopper in my off-time, so I hotwired the starter engine, blew out the cargo bay doors and escaped. It was _my_ ship, after all. I'd earned it. I hadn't spent all those years working two-bit jobs in shady space ports to get as far as I had just to let some pirate captain take me halfway the wrong way across the galaxy again."

"Lujean didn't chase after you?"

"He couldn't. Those engines were bust. He'd be lucky to make it to the nearest space port the way I left him… Or, he would have been lucky if I hadn't sent a transmission back to EITC's corporate office before I left the ship, letting them know exactly what their hotshot captain had been getting up to…" She sighed and turned to look at him. "I had a good story. What gave it away?"

He nodded to the pod. "Any ship that carried a pod like that would be ancient, derelict. You're a good mechanic. I can't see you flying a junk-heap like that across the galaxy unless you had to."

"Carmen, truthfully, how long since you arrived on Earth?" he asked.

"Thirteen years," she said.

"And how long since you brought the pod into the city?"

"Just over three years," she said. "Why do you ask?"

"You're sure that you dumped _all_ the radioactive fuel cells into the ocean on reentry? There was a lot going on, and you couldn't have been sure, with the damage your ship had already taken, there wasn't some trace left behind?"

"Of course I'm sure. What are you getting at, Doctor? Give me that!" She grabbed the lantern out of his hand and climbed the stepladder again, holding her long skirt out of the way with one hand. She wrenched open the hatch and shone the light into the engine, but she'd been over the pod a hundred times since her landing. There was nothing new to see.

"You saw something that I missed," she said, turning round and scowling down at him. "What is it? You can't help but show off, acting all clever. No one else can be as clever as you, so what is it? Tell me!" She jumped down to the floor with a spring in her step that no forty-year-old woman should have had.

"I can't be sure…" he said. But he was sure. There was no other explanation. The timeline was right. He'd suspected the truth when he'd seen the sonic's readings back at the Tardis, but now he had all the evidence he needed. He just wished that he were wrong.

"You had this in mind all along, didn't you?" Karena said, furious. "You tricked me to get a look at my pod. Well, go on then! Show us how brilliant you are! Two hundred years, I've been on my own, and I survived! No thanks to you. And every time I get settled, you show up and ruin everything. You think I'm just some toy you can pick up and play with whenever you lose another one of your pretty companions? You think I'll always be here waiting for you, to hand you your spanner and tell you how brilliant you are? Well I'm not, and I won't. I'm tired of this! I'm tired of you! I am not your _other woman_!"

"My… my other what?" he stared at her. Two hundred years? But that was impossible. Whatever she may be, Carmen was still human, and humans did not live over two hundred years and still look middle-aged.

Before Karena could start shouting again, a loud noise from the front of the shop startled them both. Someone was trying to open the locked door. There was a tentative knock and a woman's voice, muffled with tears, called, "Karena? Seniorita Andalucía, estas ahi? Por favor, are you there, Miss Karena?"

"Were you expecting company?" the Doctor whispered.

"Paola," Karena said. "She must have seen the light out front. What is she doing here? It's after midnight…" She moved toward the door, but the Doctor caught her arm.

"You can't let her inside. You can't let her see this!" He gestured toward the escape pod.

"I know her. She's stubborn. If she saw the light, then she won't leave, and she'll bring others here who'll ask more questions. I'll keep her in the front room." Karena shook off his hand. "You stay back here, out of the way. I'm more worried about trying to explain _you_."

She turned to go, and acting on an impulse, the Doctor took out his sonic screwdriver and scanned her back as she walked away. The sonic hummed quietly as it took readings of all her vital signs, and he tucked it away quickly into his pocket before she could look around and see what he was doing. He nodded to her, and she frowned at him, suspicious, but Paola was knocking again. While Karena hurried into the front room to answer the door, the Doctor hid himself in the shadows of the narrow hallway to listen in on what was said between the two women.

Karena stepped quickly across the floor of the shop's front room. As she circled the large, round table in the center of the room, she suddenly stopped and rocked back on her feet, feeling light headed and dizzy. She started to put out her hand, but there was no table. There had never been a table there… at least, not as long as she'd owned the place.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. It was all the Doctor's fault, showing up like this after all these years and after the way he'd left her. She'd had a good grip on things and had finally begun to feel at home in her own skin, but of course he'd brought back old feelings, and old… difficulties. She let out her breath slowly and when she opened her eyes, the table was gone. She hurried to unlock the door and opened it to find a trembling, red-eyed Paola on the steps outside.

"Cariña! What are you doing here? And in the middle of the night! You don't want trouble." Karena ushered Paola into the shop and shut the door behind her. She whipped out a handkerchief and wiped the younger woman's teary eyes.

"Oh, Señorita Andalucía, you were not at your house, but I had to speak to you. There was an Englishman! He said that he knew you, and he knew about Angél! Please, Karena, tell me you are not still looking for my brother. Angél is dead. He is gone. No good can come of awakening old griefs!" Paola burst into tears, and Karena wrapped her arms around the woman. She knew immediately what had happened. The Doctor had happened, as usual.

"No, Paola. What would make you think that? That man was a newspaperman. He came to my door, too, and asked me all sorts of questions. I told him to go away. He was no friend of mine."

"But he knew… He asked about the Goblin. How could he know about my grandmother's goblin?"

"Probably he heard about it from Pascualina. You know how she likes to tell tall tales. Paola, I loved your brother like my own family. Do you think I would go telling his story to strangers and newspapermen?"

"So you are not looking into his disappearance again?" Paola demanded. "I did not think that you would do that, but the note you sent me this morning, and it was that man who was waiting for me here… What are you doing here, Karena? Your words are different, and you do not look like yourself." Paola stepped back and looked her up and down. "You are younger, somehow…"

"The dim light flatters me," Karena said quickly, "and your eyes are tired from all the sewing you do. Why are you out so late? You should be home in bed. Does your aunt know you're here?"

Paola shook her head. Karena sighed. She hadn't meant for Paola to run into the Doctor the way she had. She hadn't known that he would follow her to the shop. She crossed her fingers that he would keep quiet and say back until she could see the woman off.

"I have something for you," Karena said, fishing the envelope out of her skirt pocket. In her hurry to catch a glimpse of the Doctor's Tardis she had forgotten to post the letter earlier in the night. "I'm taking a trip soon, and I don't know how long I will be gone. Maybe years, maybe longer. You have been a good friend, my only friend, and I want you to take this." She pressed the envelope into Paola's protesting hands. "There is money there, for you and for Sofia and Miguel, enough to open your own sewing shop. Promise me that you will do it."

"Karena, I cannot-"

"I've inherited a great deal of money from a distant uncle," Karena lied. "Please, take this little bit. I have so much more. I want you to be taken care of. It is the least I can do… for Angél."

Paola hesitated, and then nodded. She tucked the envelope into her pocket. "You were like a mother to him," she said. "He called you Madrastra." She smiled fondly and pulled Karina close. "You must write to me," she said. "I will miss you, mi amiga extraña."

"I will try to write," Karena said, holding the young woman tight. It would have been easier to mail the letter, but she was glad to say goodbye to her friend face-to-face. She hadn't appreciated her own mother and father when she'd had them, and they had all been left behind when the Doctor stole her away. It would be nearly another hundred years before Carmen could hug her mother again, and even then, she knew, she wouldn't be able to do it. She was too old, and too changed, to go home now.

She let go of Paola and urged her gently toward the door. "Hurry home, Cariña," she said, "and be careful!"

"Buenas noches, Karena, Adiós."

"Adiós, Paola," Karena said, shutting the door behind her. "Goodbye." She leaned her forehead against the cold door and wiped a tear from her eye. The Doctor was waiting, and she was still angry with him, she reminded herself. She put out the kerosene lamp in the front room – to avoid any further interruptions - and walked back, not bothering to step around the place where the old shop table used to stand, piled high with catalogues and swatches of fabric for carriage seats for long-gone customers to paw through.

The Doctor was waiting for her at the far end of the hall. "You were very close with that girl," he commented.

She nodded. "When I first landed, I was terrified of interfering, of changing the future, changing history. You'd always made such a big deal about it. But eventually, I figured one person couldn't change all _that_ much by accident. Still, it's hard to make friends when you have to keep so many things a secret. Paola never cared about my past, as long as I was with her in the moment. She's a good person. Better than I am."

"And the two of you are…" he chose his words more carefully. "The last time I saw you, you'd been dating a woman."

"Mia," Karena said, nodding. "She's dead. Or, she will be, in another hundred years or so."

"And you and Paola are…" he cleared his throat.

Karena stared at him. "How could you think that!" she said, horrified. "Honestly, Doctor, you've been around aliens too much!"

"She's a very attractive woman," he said, suddenly feeling very embarrassed. "And you two were very… affectionate. Very close. Almost like… almost like family." Realization suddenly dawned on him. The same dark eyes, the same red hair. The way that Carmen spoke of Angél as if he were her own child. Not her child, but…

"Paola is my great-great-grandmother," Karena said, staring at him and daring him to criticize her for interfering in her own family history. "You met Sofia at the boarding house? A little girl with reddish-blonde hair? She is my great-grandmother, Paola's daughter, though she calls her sister to keep the gossips at bay."

"And Angél?" the Doctor asked.

"He was really Paola's younger brother. I didn't realize who he was when he first showed up on the Professor's doorstop. It wasn't until later, after I met his sister…" Karena smiled. "Little Sofia Elizondo will move to France after the war, and her eldest daughter, my grandmother, Angélita Elizondo Martin will become a famous singer in Paris. She will be very beautiful, and her husband will be very jealous. After he threatens to kill one of her lovers, she will escape to America where she will marry again, a much more forgiving man, and give birth to a son, my father, Miguel Ortiz, who will one day meet and marry my mother, Maria Santiago."

"And they will have a daughter," the Doctor finished for her, "Carmen Satiago Ortiz, the brave adventuress and reluctant time-traveller." He shook his head. "It is dangerous, you know, meddling in time. Things happen, bad things that you cannot control."

"What bad?" Karena said. "I had nothing to do with Angél's disappearance. No one in my family ever said anything about a great-uncle Angél, and after so many years, no one will remember Karena Andalucía, the one-time friend of tatara abuela Paola who disappeared into the night after inheriting a fortune from her rich, dead uncle."

"No, I suppose they won't," the Doctor admitted. He glanced at the escape pod in the middle of the carriage factory floor. He thought of the empty egg sack near the fuel cell casing, and the crack in the engine block. He thought of the sempry, huge and hungry, mutated by radiation that couldn't possible have come from Earth. It would be easier to keep this secret to himself, but if he was going to have any chance of catching the creature, and of preventing it from killing anyone else's child, then he would need Carmen's help. This was her ship, and she knew the streets of Zaragoza. Also, he was reluctant to admit, her technical skill was almost as good as his. He couldn't hope to find anyone on this planet as good as she was when it came to adapting 1930s machinery to technology so much more advanced.

"Carmen, there's something you should know about the sempry…" he said. "I think I know how the creature that killed Angél ended up on Earth."

* * *

 **Woohoo! I bet you thought I'd never write a new chapter :)**

 **Please leave a review or something! I love getting your feedback and answering your questions. And if you don't, then I'll have to start making up my own questions to answer! Like this:**

 **Question: How the heck did Carmen/Karena get a carriage-sized space ship through town without anyone noticing?**

 **Answer: She hired a blind men's moving company to move it in the middle of the night. * _ba dum tsh_ ***

 **That's not the real answer, but wouldn't it be better to ask your own questions, anyway ;)**

 **-Paint**


	17. Chapter 17

**I own no part of the Doctor Whoniverse. Seriously, I don't, but I keep getting their mail and their magazine subscriptions. The interstellar postal service has really gone down hill since the switched to private ownership.**

* * *

"You're wrong," Karena said, shaking her head. "You're wrong. I would have noticed a hitchhiker on my own ship!"

"It wasn't your ship, and you didn't notice the egg sack," the Doctor said. "You said you knew that engine inside and out? If you did, you'd've seen it."

"I did!" she said. "I mean, I do know those engines! It's an old ship. There's bound to be cobwebs in the corners." She crossed her arms, sulking. "That doesn't mean you're right."

"No, it's possible that a thousand alien ships have landed on this planet, and any one of them might've been carrying sempry, but…"

"But what? Hmm? Don't hold back on my account. I know you've got another shoe to drop." She glared at him.

"The one we're after," he said, "its cells mutated while it was still in the egg. That means radiation. The radiation of a blown-out engine crash landing a stolen space pod, for example."

"I didn't steal it," she said angrily. "Anyway, if what you say is true, then the eggs would have hatched miles up in the mountains. The Sempry wouldn't had travelled all the way down here, they'd be off hunting squirrels or terrorizing farmers in the countryside."

"How did you bring the pod into the city?" he demanded. "When did you bring it in?"

"I asked a giant eagle to carry it," she snapped. "How do you think I brought it here? I hired a wagon and horses."

The Doctor frowned at her until she rolled her eyes and fished in her pocket. She pulled out a matte-black case, about the size of a small deck of cards, and tossed it to him. "There. Satisfied?"

He turned the case over. "An S.E.P. field? These are banned by the Shadow Proclamation, a thousand years imprisonment if you're caught with one outside of a museum." He stared at her, but she only shrugged. He couldn't even pretend to be surprised. He sighed and threw it back to her. "A bit large, isn't it?" he said.

"I haven't had any complaints yet."

"Well, you've got one now. The eggs were mutated by the engine blow-out, but it wasn't enough to hatch them. The radiation from the S.E.P. field, however, and one last burst from the engines to get the pod through those doors…" he pointed to the large, double doors that led from the carriage shop's yard onto the builder's floor. They'd been boarded up decades ago, but there were signs that they'd been opened again only a few years past.

"The sempry are a cooperative species. The nest in your ship could have been made a hundred years ago, and a million lightyears away. Cold space would keep the eggs dormant, waiting for heat to trigger the lifecycle. Your engines mutated them, the crash woke them, and the S.D.P. hatched it. I'm sorry, Carmen. There's no other answer." He turned back to her and in the electric light of the torch, he could see her face was pale, her hands clenched in shaking fists.

"You're wrong," she said.

"No, I'm not."

"You are accusing me of murder, Doctor."

"You didn't know what you were doing," he muttered, turning away. What was he doing? He asked himself. Why wasn't he angry? He should have been giving her a dressing-down for her carelessness, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. "It was an accident," he said.

Karena wasn't comforted. "So, it's manslaughter, then! Well, you're wrong anyway. It wouldn't be the first time."

What wouldn't he have done, the Doctor thought, to have a chance to go home again? What risks would he take, how careless could he be, to set foot on Gallifrey? He felt nothing but sympathy for the corner she'd been backed into. It was a terrible thing, to realize that a mistake you had made cost the life of someone – or everyone – that you loved. But you had to accept the truth. There was no hiding from it. It would follow you wherever you tried to run…

"Yes, I've been wrong before," the Doctor agreed. "But I'm not wrong this time. Carmen, I…"

"That is not my name," she snapped. "I am not that woman anymore. You left Carmen out there," she gestured up, at the dusty shadows among the ceiling beams, "somewhere on the other side of the universe. You abandoned her a hundred years ago and a million lightyears away. And she is not coming back." She turned her back on him.

The Doctor was growing angry now, but he checked himself and looked up at the pod. He frowned thoughtfully for a moment, making a few calculations. "That's too bad," he said, casually, "because I have no use for middle-aged housekeepers. What I could really use is Carmen's help right now." He ducked around to the other side of the escape pod and used the sonic to open the maintenance hatch under the engine.

"Help?" Karena followed him around the pod. "You need _my_ help with what?"

"Not _your_ help. Carmen's."

He glanced at her, and then dove waist deep into the maintenance hatch that accessed the pods lesser mechanical functions: the radio equipment, medical supply box and survival gear. Carmen had taken most of that with her when she first crash landed on Earth. The transmission circuits were back at her house hooked up to a large, black rotary telephone, but the sensor relays were still where they ought to be. And the laser diodes – all twelve of them.

"What are you doing in there?" Karena demanded.

The Doctor used the sonic to unscrew one of the diodes and stuck his hand down out of the hatch. "Hold this, will you?" he said, and waited a full four heartbeats (eight if you counted both hearts) before she took it from him. He smiled.

"I'm going to build a cage," he said, unscrewing another and dropping it into her hand. This time, she was there waiting for him.

"Wire cage?" Karena's voice was muffled through the metal pod.

"What? No, not wire. Electric," he said. "If I can adjust the frequency of these laser diodes, I can create an electrical cage that should disrupt the sempry's ability to create special distortions. They'd work their way through a wire cage in seconds…"

He felt something shuffling at his knees and looked down to find Carmen wriggling her way into the narrow – now much narrower – space inside the pod.

"Ah, excuse me… ah, oh!" The Doctor made as much room as he possibly could for her, but by the time she'd stood up, their bodies were pressed together and their faces only inches apart. She'd put on a few inches in her middle-age.

"I didn't say wire cage," she said. "I said _why_ a _cage_? You need a trap, not a cage. We have to kill that thing."

"I won't kill it," the Doctor said. He tried to get his arm up to unscrew another diode, but there was little space and she wouldn't move. He could feel her hot breath on his cheek.

"That mutated monster has killed six children. Probably more. What are you going to do? Live trap it and drop it in the woods somewhere like a misplaced rabbit!?"

The Doctor cleared his throat and looked away. He was beginning to feel claustrophobic, trapped in the same space as her. "I can name at least seventeen uninhabited planets where even a mutated sempry can hunt to its heart's content for a thousand years without hurting a sentient soul. All we have to do is catch it and I will carry it away from this planet forever."

Karena seemed to shrink a little at that. "So, you'll fly that creature away, that thing. You'll find it a home, take care of it after everything it's done… but you'll leave me here, alone." She smiled bitterly and slapped the two diodes she held into the Doctor's hand. "You're on your own, Doctor. Good luck, but I want that thing dead. I will see it dead." She slid down his body and ducked out of the ship.

He muttered a curse under his breath and considered letting her go. He could take what he wanted from the pod and build the cage that he needed, but… it would take longer without her help. She knew the local streets and had a better knowledge of where the six children had gone missing that he did. She also knew the tech in this pod better than he did, reluctant as he was to admit it. He might spend all night building the cage only to have to wait for days and nights before the right sempry wandered into it. The job could take weeks, or it could take hours, depending on Carmen's help. The sempry could kill more children in that time, and what's more, the Doctor had no interest in hanging around 1930's Spain for weeks.

He ducked out of the pod and went after her. "It won't fix anything," he shouted. She was halfway to the hall that led to the front door of the ship. "Killing that creature won't stop the guilt you're feeling right now. Karena."

She stopped short but didn't turn around.

"Believe me," he said, walking towards her. "You can kill the goblin that killed your cousin, but that won't make it go away. That anger, that grief that's gnawing at you… the fear in the pit of your stomach. You can kill a hundred of them or a hundred thousand." He stood behind her now, a few feet away, but she had to cross the gap, not him. "You can kill the whole species, but it won't stop the pain."

She sighed. "So what will? Following your plan, I suppose?"

He shook his head. "No. I don't know. I haven't figured that out yet," he admitted, "but I'll let you know when I do."

To his relief, she laughed – sadly, but still it was still a laugh. She turned around and even in the dim light, he felt her eyes on him, searching, calculating and, after a moment, she nodded. She walked up to him and then past him, taking the sonic from his hand. She ducked underneath the pod and stood up into the maintenance hatch. He saw blue light and heard the whir of the sonic unscrewing the remaining diodes.

He crouched at her feet rather than trying to fit himself into that small space with her again. He asked the one question that still troubled him. "What did you mean before, when you said it was my turn? It's more than just a game, isn't it? It was important to you…"

"And to you," she said, dropping a diode without warning. He was just quick enough to catch it. The sonic was silent for a long moment, and then she crouched down next to him to look him in the eye. "It means trust," she said. "It was your turn to trust me this time, to trust that I know what I'm doing here. That I'm right… this time. You're not always the only one with the answers, you know."

"I begin to suspect…" He felt another piece fall into place. It felt right, familiar, this way of doing business with her, taking turns, following the rules. "So, we're friends who don't trust each other?"

"I trusted you the last time we met," she said, the old anger creeping back into her voice. "I trusted you with my life, but you wouldn't listen. You thought you know everything, and by the time I… well, by then it was too late, wasn't it." She shook her head. He stared at her, blankly. It was his future. He didn't know what had happened between them yet.

She scowled. "I'm surprised you haven't guessed," she said. "You're usually so clever at figuring things out." She couldn't tell him his future, but she couldn't resist the urge to hint at the damage he had caused. She knocked her fist against her right leg, just above the knee. It was a hard sound, a solid thump of… metal?

The Doctor stared at her.

"Bonded polycarbide," she said, "coated in a self-regenerating sheath, a clone of my own skin cells. The Engineers did a good job with it. Bulletproof, even, except the sheath, of course. It does everything I need it to do, better than my own leg, in fact. I could never have afforded something like this on my own."

"How…?" But he knew she wouldn't answer him. "We could… trust each other, both equally, this time," he said. "We could work together, do better… I could do better," he corrected himself. She had already lived it. She couldn't change her past.

Carmen smiled and shook her head. "You can't," she said.

"I can try…"

"You can't, because you didn't." She put her hand on his knee. "It will happen because it's already happened. You know how these things happen, Doctor. Don't worry about it. Besides, this works for us. Today it's my turn to trust you, and tomorrow…" She shrugged her shoulders.

"We just met," he reminded her. "I don't know the rules. I think we can do without them this once. We can both trust each other, equally." He held out his hand.

She hesitated. "You're only going to be disappointed."

"I trust you." He smiled and pushed his hand closer. "Hello, ma'am. I'm called the Doctor." He raised an eyebrow.

She stared, and then she sighed, and then she shook her head but she also shook his hand. "Carmen," she said, reluctantly. "Carmen Santiago Ortiz, or what's left of her. And I've got work to do, so if you want this cage finished before sunup…"

He let go of her hand, still smiling, and watched her disappear back into the maintenance hatch. A moment later, a blue glow lit up her face as the sonic whirred away. One-by-one, Carmen dropped the diodes into his hand, along with a few other parts that he hadn't thought of needing yet. It wasn't a very complicated cage, to be honest, the calibration of the electrical output would be the tricky part – and he couldn't be sure he had the figures right until the sempry was actually inside the cage – but with Carmen's help, it shouldn't take long to build. The more he thought about it, the power hook-up would be tricky, too, what with the changes she'd made to the fuel system, but the Doctor was confident that once it was hooked up, he could keep the cage powered for at least an hour which was more than long enough to transport the Sempry to a new world far from Earth. He could save the world.

And if he could just keep Carmen in line… maybe he could save her, too. This time.

.

The Doctor jogged easily through the midnight streets of Zaragoza, squinting up at the sot-stained street signs and trying to match the names against the illegible scrawl that was Carmen's map. She might have been a doctor herself for all that he could make out her handwriting, and he was pretty sure she had written it that way on purpose, but he was relying on her knowledge of the streets and he had promised to trust her.

It had been tempting to send _her_ out here instead of him, to act as bait while he finished the cage, but as hard as he tried, he didn't trust her not to shoot the sempry on sight. She could finish the cage just as quickly as he could with the figures he'd given her. He had an hour to find the mutant sempry and lure it back to the shop. He trusted Carmen to have the cage finished in an hour.

The Doctor glanced up at the sky. Night has switched over to morning by now, and there were few people on the streets. Men lurked in doorways, smoking cigarettes, and women stood with their skirt hiked up at the hip, gathering under the yellow light of the lamps. One of the women called out to him as he hurried passed and he turned to scan her with the sonic. She recoiled from the strange, blinking device and one of the lurking men stepped forward, ready to defend his merchandise.

The Doctor frowned at the sonic.

"Am I not good enough for ye?" the woman said, resting her fist on her hip.

"Rats," the Doctor said. "Big rats, hairless, long arms, about this long…" he measured the size of the sempry with his hands. She stared at him, open-mouthed in amazement. "You're right," he said, snapping his fingers. "It would be too clever for that. It'll keep to the shadows… and the rooftops. Thanks anyway." He jogged on and the woman rejoined her fellow street-walkers on the corner to laugh at the looney and wait for saner customers.

The Doctor was very aware of the night people, the pickpockets and worse, but he guessed rightly that they wouldn't bother with the crazy man and his blinking penlight running around in an oil-stained coat and third-hand cap. He didn't even have his tie anymore, just a loose-collar shirt missing its top two buttons. He grinned, feeling the wind in his hair. The game is afoot, he thought to himself as he ran, and then skidded to a halt as the sonic chirped louder, picking up a radiation trail that matched the sempry's signal leading down one of the narrower side streets.

He checked the sign, but it wasn't on Carmen's map. He was two blocks north of the road where Angel had last been seen. There were fewer lamps here; half were dark and the other half were so covered in soot that they gave off hardly any light at all. There were no women gathered under these lamps. Even the pros looked for safer streets elsewhere. The houses on either side of him were hunched, crooked and crouched together for warmth. Doors here were double barred, windows shuttered and latched tight. Behind them, the Doctor could hear the raucous laughter of women and the angry cussing of men. The sonic was blinking faster now, beeping louder, as he headed into the alleyway.

The Doctor's eyes were on the rooftops and not on the ground. He tripped over a pile of old cans and caught himself against the wall, waiting for the clatter to die down. No one looked out of the windows overhead. No one opened their door to see what was going on out there. Not in this neighborhood. It was the perfect hunting ground, really.

He was about to move on when he heard a different sound, a soft sniffle coming from behind a rotting beer barrel to his left. Warily, he peered over the rim and saw a small, round face looking up at him from out of a pile of dirty cloth.

The face was a child, and the cloth was its clothes. The dirt was smudged on its cheeks. It was old enough, it might even have been one of the gang of boys that had attacked him on the street that morning.

Putting the thought aside, the Doctor reached out his hand. "Hello. I'm the Doctor, and I'm here to…"

"Pendejo!" the child shouted, throwing a handful of dirt at him – definitely one of the original gang. "Déjame en paz!" The boy shouted and tried to run, but the Doctor caught his arm.

"Wait a minute," he demanded, struggling to hold onto the squirming child. "I'm looking for a… for the goblin," he said, feeling a bit silly. "Duende. You know it? Have you seen it? Is that what you're hiding from?"

The boy stopped twisting and looked up in horror, not at the Doctor but over him. The night seemed suddenly a great deal darker, the streets emptier than they had been before. Slowly, the Doctor loosened his grip on the child and turned around. He looked up. A black shape hung from the gutter near the mouth of the alley. He wouldn't have thought anything of it; it looked like a sack of forgotten laundry until it opened its eyes.

"Duende! El Duende! Corra!" the boy tore free of the Doctor's loose grip and ran away down the alley. The Goblin's eyes followed the child and its body seemed to swing forward as if it meant to give chase.

"Hey!" The Doctor shouted. "Hey! Over here!" The sempry hesitated and turned is red eyes back to the Doctor. It hissed and swung down to a lower window ledge.

"That's right," the Doctor muttered to himself. "That's right. This way." He twisted the sonic, running through the likely frequencies without taking his eyes off the creature. "I've faced down armies," the Doctor cried. "I think I can handle one, little space-rat!" He aimed the sonic at the creature, guessing that he could stun it with about 150 kHz. He pressed the button and laughed as the sempry shrieked and cowered back against the wall, but it didn't try to run and it wasn't stunned. It recovered faster than he thought it would. It was hissing at him again, but the sound was different this time, deeper, soft and regular. The creature was laughing at _him_.

The Doctor backed away, more carefully this time. He had two narrow walls on either side of him and the creature was blocking the entrance. If he had to run, there was only one way to go. He took a step back, and then another. His eyes were on the sempry that hadn't moved but was watching him the whole time.

A handful of rotten leaves showered down on him from above. He tore his eyes from the sempry to look up… directly into another pair or red eyes and an open, hissing mouth full of sharp, yellow teeth.

The Doctor gave a shout and leaped back, stumbling and nearly falling over. More than one! There was more than one and he should have guessed it! Sempry nests can hold up to three eggs at a time. Of course there would be more than one creature that had been mutated by the ship's radiation, and he couldn't fight them. Not here. The sonic had no effect. The Doctor felt the bruises aching around his throat and knew that his only chance now was Carmen. He would have to run and hope that she had finished the cage in time.

The Doctor turned and ran. The sempry gave chase. He could hear them scratching at the brick, scurrying over the roof as they chased him out of the alley and down the street. When he looked back, he could see them swinging from lamppost to rain gutter, and they were gaining on him. He hoped the child had been able to escape, but for himself, he had no idea which way to run. He'd lost Carmen's map, but there would have been no time to stop and check it now. He thought he recognized one of the buildings up ahead, crossed his fingers and turned the corner… and almost ran smack into a blind alleyway.

He spun around to run out again, but it was too late. The first of the Goblins had reached the mouth of the alley. He was trapped. He tried to think his way out, but there were very few options that he could see, unless he learned to fly. There were no doors and no windows low enough to climb through even if he could get them open. There wasn't even a convenient fire escape or manhole nearby. He fumbled desperately with the sonic, trying every frequency, but none had any effect on the sempry. It dropped down from the roof to a second floor window. It hung by one arm from the ledge, snickering and then… a gunshot rang out. And then a second. The noise cracked like thunder between the brick walls. The sempry shrieked, and the Doctor covered his ears.

The Sempry swung past him fleeing up the wall again and over the rooftops. The Doctor's ears rang in the silence and he turned back around slowly to see the dark silhouette of a woman in long skirts standing at the mouth of the alley, backlit by the streetlights. He may not have recognized the dumpy, hourglass shape, but he knew the way she held the gun loose in one hand.

"How many times do I have to save your life, Doctor?" Carmen said, pocketing her pistol.

Relieved, he hurried out of the alley. "What are you doing here?" he demanded. "You're supposed to be back at the shop, working on the cage!"

She stared at him blankly for a moment, and then smiled. "Oh, right. Well, you're welcome, anyway," she said, letting him hurry her away from the alley and into the open street.

The sempry couldn't get a drop on them if there was nowhere to drop from. "There's two of them," he said, "maybe more. But I think I've got an idea. 150 kHz. It hurts them… well, it annoys them, anyway. If I can amplify the sound of the sonic, there's a good chance they'll follow us back to the… to the…" He frowned and looked her up and down. "You've changed. That's a different dress."

"What, this old thing," she said without missing a beat. "I think if you run now, those things'll follow you anywhere. That's twice you've stolen their meal out from under them."

"Ah, right. Right." He frowned at the row of pockets the front of her skirt. He couldn't remember seeing them before. "And the cage…?"

"It's done."

"What, already?" He would have thought she'd need at least twenty minutes more.

She shrugged and her gaze grew distant as if she were pulling out the file of some memory from a long time ago. "I mirrored the diodes and hooked the power cells up to the pod engine. Easy as Babel Fish pie. All you've got to do is set the ignition keys, start the engines and the couplings should snap into place… if you had the frequency right, that was."

"Alright. Well… Allons-y!" he said, and turned to run, expecting her to follow him.

"Doctor, wait!" He looked around. "The shop's this way." She hooked her thumb in the opposite directions.

He looked up and down the empty streets. It all looked the same to him, and he'd thought he was on Karena's street, that he'd turned down Karena's alleyway when he'd gone down that dead end. Turns out he was wrong. It wouldn't be the first time.

He nodded for Carmen to lead the way. "Ladies first," he said.

She hesitated and looked down at the band on her wrist, checking the time, he guessed, wondering why she bothered. "I suppose I could make a small detour," she muttered to herself. She looked up at him and grinned. "Vamanos!" She said and took off running.

The Doctor followed her, in part to keep an eye on her, but also because she was running so fast that he had to struggle to keep up. He was disappointed, until he remembered the mechanical leg she wore. Better than the original, she'd told him, and now he believed her.

"I like the new dress," he gasped as they darted through an intersection. Something knocked over a trashcan behind them, a cat – or a rat. "Good color, goes well with the hair," he added. "Red hair… it was black before…"

"It's always been red," she said. There was another crash behind them. Carmen looked over her shoulder. "Two of them, you said?"

"Two, that I know of."

She frowned, thoughtfully and then ran faster. The Doctor, already straining to keep up with her augmented speed, began to fall farther behind, but Carmen reached out and took his hand. She pulled him along with her, leading him on a zig-zag route that he never would have found on his own. He recognized the street now, the high wooden fence that surrounded the lot behind the carriage shop. The gate was locked and boarded shut, but Carmen skidded to a halt in front of it. The Doctor doubled over, gasping. He looked up. The top of the fence was at least eight feet high.

"Give me a moment," he said, fumbling for the sonic.

"I don't think a screwdriver is going to pry loose all these wooden boards. We'll have to climb." She looked at him, his hands on his knees, his breath coming fast. "Can you make it?"

He nodded. "I can make it. But Carmen," he said, "you're not… you're not my Carmen. You've changed."

She looked at him. "You think you're the only one who gets to?" she asked.

He shook his head, but he was looking hard at her. The face and voice were the same, but the clothes were different, more worn out and patched up, and her hair was its natural shade of burnt copper. She was older. Not by much, but definitely older that the Carmen he'd left back at the shop.

She smiled and squeezed his hand. "It's always nice to see you, Doctor. Now, come on." She stepped back and crouched down, holding out her hands with the fingers laced together. "You're not as old as you used to be. I'll give you a boost."

He hesitated, but she seemed sure of herself, so he entrusted his foot to her hands and the next thing he knew he was flying through the air. He managed to catch himself before his feet hit the ground and bent his knees to absorb the impact. For a moment, he waited for her to follow him, but she didn't appear. Beyond the wall, he could hear the sempry hissing and scratching over the rooftops. They wouldn't have any trouble getting over that wall.

He raced across the muddy yard to the back door of the shop. He tried the handle, but it was locked, and as he fumbled for the sonic in his pocket, he could feel the breath of the sempry on the back of his neck. The sonic was set at the new frequency, and he had to twist the handle to get it back to default settings, but before he could aim it at the lock, the bolt turned and the door opened. The Doctor ran through and slammed it shut again behind him, turning the bolt just as something heavy slammed against the wood from outside. He'd made it in time – with a little help – but there was no time to celebrate. Walls and doors meant nothing to a sempry, it would find its way in.

Carmen stared at him, his mud-stained pants and the leaves in his hair. "What happened to you?" she asked. "You're early."

He ran past her toward the pod and the spaghetti mess of cables and diodes on the floor beside it. "You said it was finished." He pulled open the access panel on the side of the pod and stared at the knot of bypass wires and circuits. He shook his head and backed away, unable to think straight with so many new facts and figures working through his brain.

"I said what? I just finished it. I twisted off the last wire in the power cells when you knocked, but I haven't had a chance to test it," she said, staring at him as if he were mad. "What's wrong with you?"

The Doctor grabbed the hand lamp up from the floor and shone the light over her. Green dress, the same green dress, but no pockets. No pockets. Her hair was ink-blackened with rust red showing at the roots. It had been red before.

"Not my Carmen," he muttered, relieved.

"Doctor, what happened to you?"

He frowned at her. She'd lied to him before, but he didn't think she was a good enough actress to fool him this time. She didn't know. "Nothing," he said. He could already hear the sempry scampering over the roof. "It's nothing. There's no time to test it. We've got to hurry. They're coming."

" _They_?"

He jumped up the ladder and reached into the pod's cockpit, flipping a few switches and listening to the whirring the power cells hooked up to the diode grid. There was a loud bang from the ceiling and a crack, then a crash as broken glass rained down on them. The Doctor threw up his arms to cover his head, and then looked up through the broken skylight. One of the sempry shrieked. In the dark, it was impossible to see what was going on above their heads.

"Start the engine!" the Doctor shouted. Now would be the time to worry about those frequency numbers, but he wasn't worried. He trusted Carmen, and she seemed to think that this would work. That it _had_ worked. "Turn it on!"

Carmen flipped open the cover on her wristband and pressed a sequence of buttons. The electric cage hummed to life. The control panel in the cockpit exploded in sparks. The Doctor covered his eyes and reached down blindly to flip the final switch.

The cage turned on. The diodes lit up. Like an explosion of light and cord, the net snapped open. It was a thing of beauty, blue stars against a black sky. The sempry shrieked again as the net swept them up and held them. Carmen shouted to him, but he couldn't hear her over the noise. At the same moment, a broken beam fell from the ceiling, striking him on the back of the head. He fell from the ladder to the cement floor. The last thing he saw was Carmen's silhouette backlit by the blue glow of the electric cage as she ran along the cables, battling voltage to keep the power running steady, and then everything went dark.

* * *

 **THE END**

 **No, not really, but wouldn't that be just devastating :D**

 **I'm tempted to do it. That's just the mood I'm in.**

 **-paint**


End file.
